Mayank Hirani

Home Institution
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2022

Year in School
Undergraduate

REU Faculty Mentor
Mohammed El-Kebir

Research Area Interest
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Project Title
Sars-CoV-2 Variant Diversity in Chronic Patients

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

Variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been emerging since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies speculated that chronic patients provide an environment for the intra-host evolution of new variants. Longitudinal RNA sequencing data also supports this speculation as we observe a mixture of different mutations and their frequency changes over time. The goal of this project is to develop a method to identify variants within a chronic patient and further quantify the abundance of each variant at each timepoint using the longitudinal RNA-seq data.

Bio:

Mayank is a rising Sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign majoring in Computer Science, from Champaign, IL. He is interested in Software Engineering, Bioinformatics, Algorithms, AI, and is open to exploring new areas. He wants to apply a deep understanding of computer science to innovative ideas.