Teaching Team

Radhika Khetani manages the bioinformatics training program at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core at HSPH, with a focus on developing bioinformatics workshops and training modules of various lengths for the Harvard community. Her passion is to make genomics data and its analysis accessible to everyone. She has spent the last several years training wet lab biologists to independently perform bioinformatics analyses. She is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

She joined the core in Fall 2014 from the High-Performance Biological Computing (HPCBio) group at University of Illinois (UIUC) where she was involved in several research projects, and was in charge of the training program. Her background is in molecular biology, but she switched to computational work as a postdoctoral fellow when she started studying the impact of stress factors on the health of honey bees. Her sequence-based analysis repertoire includes metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, RNA-Seq, genome and transcriptome assembly, in species across the spectrum of life. Radhika has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Dartmouth College.

Meeta Mistry is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her training began in Biochemistry, however postgraduate interests in computational approaches fostered the transition to Bioinformatics. During her graduate career she has pursued various areas of research including the identification of bacterial drug targets, implementing metrics for functional similarity, and cancer proteomics. Her expertise includes complex statistical analysis of large-scale datasets pertaining to postmortem human brain, meta-analysis and genomics of neuropsychiatry. She also has a passion for teaching bioinformatics with experience at the high school, graduate and postgraduate level. Her current role involves both bioinformatics consulting and training efforts. Meeta has a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia.

Mary Piper is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics. She serves dual roles as research consultant and bioinformatics trainer, but her primary role is the development and instruction of bioinformatics workshops focused on the analysis of next-generation sequencing data. Her background in scientific curriculum design and instruction began at the University of Michigan, where she taught undergraduates for over five years while completing her PhD in cellular and molecular biology and her MPH in epidemiology. She combined her passions for scientific research and teaching at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as the genomics instructor for MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program where her course focused on cutting-edge biomedical research and bioinformatics analysis. Her exposure to the research at the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard, led to her desire to pursue bioinformatics as a career and to share that knowledge with the community.