Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Awards
Hobbies and Interests
Timeline
Generic

Yakov Pichkar

Ocala,FL

Summary

I am a unifier who connects ideas and data through statistics. To that end, I aim to find simple, elegant solutions. I have 8 years of experience analyzing human data related to physiology, history, and disease. My projects include analyses of biology, urban development, and language, both through work that I led and as part of collaborations across continents.

Overview

7
7
years of professional experience

Work History

Postdoctoral Researcher

Vanderbilt University
01.2024 - Current
  • Postdoctoral fellowship where I developed pipelines that process gene expression data, from quality assessment and data cleaning to running analysis and visualizing results.

PhD. Candidate in Biological Sciences

Vanderbilt University
With Dr. Nicole Creanza
01.2018 - 01.2024
  • Measured how genetic variation and disease risk is shaped by social, demographic, and evolutionary processes.
  • Participated in the NeuroGAP-Psychosis project to identify genes linked to disease, working with specialists in anthropology and population genetics in the USA and Africa.
  • Sped up a previous pipeline to identify FISH probe off-target interactions by >300%.
  • Primary author on five manuscripts, presented results to seminars and conferences.

Rotation Research With Dr. Antonis Rokas

Vanderbilt University
Nashville
08.2018 - 12.2018
  • Contributed to a method identifying disease-causing genetic loci by combining GWAS results and measures of selection.

Education

Ph.D. - Biological Sciences

Vanderbilt University
Nashville
05-2024

B.S. - Biochemistry

Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY
01.2018

Skills

  • DATA SCIENCE/MACHINE LEARNING, including regression regularization & kernel machines (SVM, clustering, convolution), random forest, neural networks
  • SQL and PostgreSQL (with psycopg2)
  • STATISTICAL METHODS (causal inference, power estimation, MCMC for optimization, Bayesian statistics)
  • PYTHON, data exploration in Jupyter, analysis, data science (TF and PyTorch), and visualization
  • R, data wrangling and visualization
  • OTHER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: Scheme (lisp), MATLAB, etc
  • GENOMICS/transcriptomics/RNAseq from QC and alignment to analysis and interpretation Both human genetics and model/non-model plants and animals
  • GNU/LINUX (bash, awk, ssh, sed, etc)
  • HPC, with Slurm scheduling
  • COMMUNICATION-figure generation, writing academic and literature reviews, presentations, working virtually with teams across countries and time zones

Awards

Templeton Foundation Grant — Author and stipend recipient, total of $234,800 to the lab., Harold Stirling fellowship — Vanderbilt fellowships for excellent scholarship.

Hobbies and Interests

Tango, gardening, swimming, sheep herding, sourdough baking

Timeline

Postdoctoral Researcher

Vanderbilt University
01.2024 - Current

Rotation Research With Dr. Antonis Rokas

Vanderbilt University
08.2018 - 12.2018

PhD. Candidate in Biological Sciences

Vanderbilt University
01.2018 - 01.2024

Ph.D. - Biological Sciences

Vanderbilt University

B.S. - Biochemistry

Stony Brook University