Student Profiles

Sam Tischfield

Sam Tischfield came from a diverse research background having worked in bioinformatics, developmental neurogenetics and chemical engineering labs as an undergrad.

Unsure of exactly which field of computational biology to pursue, he was drawn to the CBM program’s faculty and their diverse research projects. “If I suddenly found myself interested in a different aspect of computational biology, the program would allow me to work in a wide array of labs and discover which one was right for me.”

As an undergraduate at Rutgers University, Sam obtained his B.S. in Computer Science, a B.A. in Genetics and completed an Honors thesis in the chemical engineering department. He then spent two years training in medical genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. “My work at the Broad was very computational and focused on genome wide association studies. It was very fulfilling but I also wanted to work at the molecular level combining my computational and wet lab techniques.”

Upon completing rotations in neurobiology and statistical genetics, Sam chose the laboratory of HHMI investigator Dr. Scott Keeney in Sloan Kettering’s renowned molecular biology department. “I was drawn to the lab’s recent interest in using computational methods to study the formation of double stranded breaks in DNA during meiosis. It’s great to be in a lab where I can generate data at the bench, then test my ideas computationally.”