Ryan Dale, Ph.D.

Senior Scientist; NICHD Scientific Information Officer; Head of BSPC
Bldg 6A Rm 1A16, ryan.dale@nih.gov
After a Masters in Oceanography and a Ph.D. in Marine Biology from the University of Delaware, Ryan came to NIH in 2009 as the bioinformatician for a group of six PIs and about 40 post-docs in NIDDK (Laboratory of Cellular and Developmental Biology, LCDB). From 2009-2018, he became a developmental biologist, analyzed thousands of high-throughput sequencing libraries across hundreds of experiments, and led the bioinformatics on most papers published by the group. During that time he developed open-source software packages in Python, R, and C (some of which have been downloaded tens of thousands of times), contributed to many other open source software packages, co-founded the Bioconda  project, and led workshops teaching computational skills to biologists. In 2018 he started at NICHD as Scientific Information Officer, founded the Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core, and has been growing the total bioinformatics capacity of the institute through collaborations and training ever since.

Caroline Esnault, Ph.D.

Staff Scientist
Bldg 6A Rm 1A17, caroline.esnault@nih.gov
While completing her PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Lyon, France, Caroline taught Statistics, Evolution and Population Genetics. Her thesis and postdoctoral work focused on understanding the impact of transposable elements on the genome of a variety of organisms. She joined NICHD in 2011 as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Henry Levin, where she managed the lab’s high-throughput sequencer, in addition to consulting for her teammates on statistics and sequence analyses. She became fascinated with Next Generation Sequencing and learned programming in Python, Perl and R to develop or optimize the bioinformatics tools she needed. She joined the BSPC in 2018 to provide the NICHD bioinformatics core with expertise at the interface of biology and computer science.

Apratim Mitra, Ph.D.

Staff Scientist
Bldg 6A Rm 1A17, apratim.mitra@nih.gov
Apratim completed his Ph.D. in computational biology from the University of Maryland, College Park before joining NICHD in 2013 as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Karl Pfeifer. There, he worked on understanding the functions of a conserved long non-coding RNA while being closely involved in the planning and analysis of several other projects both in his lab and with collaborators in the Division of Developmental biology (DDB). As a result, he learned concepts of developmental biology and contributed to several projects in diverse contexts and co-authored multiple scientific articles. Apratim enjoys the challenge of multi-disciplinary science and has extensive experience in many aspects of bioinformatics and statistical analysis. He enjoys contributing to the development of a strong bioinformatics community and support network to enable exciting new science in the institute.

Gennady Margolin, Ph.D.

Staff Scientist
Building 6, Room 4B412, gennady.margolin@nih.gov
With a background in exact sciences and some biology, Gennady came to NIH in 2008 as a Research Fellow at NIDDK to develop skills and work on projects utilizing emergent next-gen sequencing. He was also tasked with system administration of the sequencing core computational server. In 2013 he moved to NHGRI as a Bioinformatics Scientist and among other projects, focused on studying DNA methylation in cancer and using it to detect and classify cancers. Recently, in 2019 he joined the BSPC group at NICHD and is working directly with the researchers in the Aquatic Models of Human Development group in Building 6. He is excited to take part in multiple research projects, utilize and share his knowledge and learn from others at the interface of biology, computers, and applied math.

Matthew Tyler Menold, B.S.

Post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award Fellow
Bldg 6A, Rm 1A17, matthew.menold@nih.gov
Tyler earned his B.S. in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research experience, under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Humber, involved working with two species of entomopathogenic fungus to assess their potential as natural pesticides. An online programming course from Stanford University sparked Tyler's interest in computational work, particularly in computational biology. Post-graduation, Tyler pursued a second degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon, which he plans to complete alongside his two-year post-baccalaureate fellowship. Tyler aims to apply to a Ph.D. program in Bioinformatics and, in the long term, aspires to head a research group. Outside of academia, he enjoys surfing, diving, and training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Brandon Fuller, B.S.

Post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award Fellow
Bldg 6A Rm 1A17, brandon.fuller@nih.gov
Brandon graduated from San Diego State University in 2024 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He discovered the field of bioinformatics in his last year of undergrad and became delighted at the prospect of being able to program while answering biological questions, and therefore decided to pursue a career in bioinformatics research. He joined Dr. Arun Sethuraman’s lab at SDSU and focused on building a machine learning model to find associations in the phenotypic traits of hop plants. After graduating, he completed a summer research internship with Dr. Tiffany Amariuta at the University of California San Diego where he worked on improving the ability of machine learning models to predict gene expression from a DNA sequence. During his time at the NIH, he is excited to gain experience and diversify his skillset in bioinformatics before applying for PhD programs.

Susan Valerie Czach, B.S., M.S. 

Valerie holds a BS in Biology from William & Mary and an MS in Bioinformatics from Georgetown. She originally came to NIH as a GDSSP fellow in Dr. Jason Wong's lab, where she worked on reporting cardiovascular disease incidence and prevalence rates in NIH's All of Us database. During her two-year post-baccalaureate fellowship with BPSC, she hopes to gain experience that will prepare her for a career in bioinformatics at NIH. Outside of science, she enjoys gardening, mushroom foraging, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Previous Members

• Eric Chang (post-bac, 2018-2019)
• Sydney Hertafeld (post-bac, 2018-2020)
• Nicholas Johnson (post-bac, 2019-2021)
• Arjun Mittal (post-bac, 2020-2021)
• Eva Jason (post-bac, 2020-2022)
• Henry Zhang, Ph.D. (staff scientist, 2016-2023)
• Kiersten Campbell (post-bac, 2021-2023)
• Gus Fridell (post-bac, 2021-2023)
• Ally Questell (post-bac, 2023-2024)
• Shelby Ferrier (post-bac, 2023-2024)
• Lilly Shatford-Adams (post-bac, 2022-2024)
• Emma Smith (post-bac, 2024-2025)
• E. Sally Chang, Ph.D. (Bioinformatics Training Manager, 2024-2025)
• Mira Sohn Chi, Ph.D. (Bioinformatics Scientist, 2021-2025)
• Alicia Evans (Research Software Engineer, 2023-2025)