Alon Katz

I am a Ph.D. student in the Biological Sciences program. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Genetics and Computer Science, as well as a Bachelor of Medical Science (Honors) in Bioinformatics, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. During my time there, I applied phylogenomic and comparative genomic approaches to investigate the evolution of HIV from SIV with respect to host-species-specific mutations.

Following my studies at the University of Cape Town, I joined Dr. Eugene Koonin’s laboratory at the NIH. Working closely with Drs. Kira Makarova and Yuri Wolf, I developed computational methods for genomic neighborhood analyses of diverse prokaryotic transposons, uncovering novel associations between transposons and protein-coding genes. At UMD, I am looking forward to pursuing computational research that advances our understanding of human health and disease.