The Team

Arslan Zaidi

Principal investigator

Arslan is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell, and Developmental Biology and a core member of the Institute of Health Informatics. He received his PhD in Genetics, with a minor in Statistics, from Penn State with Mark Shriver in 2016. He was a postdoc with Kateryna Makova (2016-2018) and then an NIH K99/R00 postdoc with Iain Mathieson (2019-2022). Besides his research interests, he is interested in making statistical genetics accessible. You can read more on his blog.

Jinguo Huang

Graduate student

Jinguo is a PhD student in the the Bioinformatics and Genomics program at Penn State jointly advised by Arslan and Mark Shriver. She is studying how population admixture shapes the genetic architecture of complex traits in humans.

Nicole Kleman

Graduate student

Nicole is a masters student in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program at the University of Minnesota. She received her bachelors from UMN in Mathematical Biology with minors in computer science and genetics in 2022. She is studying the accuracy of different heritability estimators in structured populations.

Parisa Riahi

Graduate student

Parisa is a PhD student in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. She received her bachelor's in statistics from The University of Tabriz, and her masters in biostatistics from Tarbiat Modares University in Iran. Then she studied the effects of assortative mating on complex traits in the Irani population under the supervision of Mahdi Akbarzadeh at Shahid Beheshti University. She is now studying the extent to which close-kin unions contribute to increased risk of common diseases.

Sol Taylor-Brill

Graduate student

Sol is a PhD student in the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology & Genetics (MCDBG) program, and an MS student in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICB) program at the University of Minnesota. She received her bachelors in Biology from Reed College in 2020. She is currently studying mitochondrial DNA variation in South Asian populations.