About Pierce


I'm a computational biologist at the NIH Vaccine Research Center, where I build methods and software to study how viruses evolve and persist. My background spans virology, RNA biology, and statistical modeling, applying math and computation to large biological datasets. Below is a short tour of the labs and projects I've worked in; my CV has the full record.


Education


Projects

A selection of projects across my current and past work.


Virus Sequencing & Evolution @ VRC/NIH

As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Eli Boritz at the Vaccine Research Center, I develop machine learning methods that make long-read, single-genome virus sequencing more accurate and higher-throughput. I build tools for simulating these sequencing datasets and pipelines to study viral evolution and selection. I led the bioinformatic analysis for a large study of SARS-CoV-2 evolution in immunocompromised individuals, where the scale of the data called for new methods.

See Ko & Radecki et al. Nat Comm, or shUMI and UMI-pacbio-pipeline on GitHub.


Computational RNA Genomics @ UC Davis

For my Ph.D. with Dr. Sharon Aviran at UC Davis, I studied RNA structure and built computational methods to predict and mine it, focusing on identifying stable local structures like stem-loops at genome and transcriptome scale.

Dissertation: "Accurate, Automated, and Scalable Identification of RNA Structure Motifs in Structurome Profiling Data."

See Radecki et al. NARGAB 2021 and Radecki et al. Genes 2018, or patteRNA and fold-fastalike on GitHub.


Software Engineering @ BrainScope, Inc.

At BrainScope, I helped build and test a custom Android application and an automated build server. The app interfaced with proprietary hardware to assess traumatic brain injury (TBI) from real-time EEG data.

See BrainScope.com.


Magnetic Nanoparticle Simulations @ UMD

As an undergraduate with Dr. Benjamin Shapiro at the University of Maryland, I built a first-principles simulation framework for magnetic nanoparticle research, modeling particle dynamics as a system of differential equations in MATLAB.

See the Control of MEMS lab at UMD.


Medical Virology @ NIAID/NIH

Earlier, with Dr. Jeffrey Cohen (Chief, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases) and Dr. Wei Bu at NIAID, I ran serological experiments to profile antigen targets in Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).

See Medical Virology at NIAID/NIH, Bu et al. Clin Vaccine Immunol. 2016, and Cohen et al. Blood 2019.