Domenick J. Braccia

PhD candidate at the University of Maryland studying bioinformatics and computational biology. Co-advised by Dr. Mihai Pop and Dr. Brantley Hall.

Research Interests

• Effects of the gut microbiome on human health and disease.
• Designing experiments and computational workflows to answer biological questions.
• Writing algorithms to analyze Next Generation Sequence data.

Education

PhD, University of Maryland, College Park, MD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017-present

• Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

BS, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2012-2016

• Physics (major); Mathematics (minor)

Publications

1. Braccia DJ, Jiang X, Pop M, Hall B. The capacity to produce hydrogen sulfide (H2S) via cysteine degradation is ubiquitous in the human gut microbiome. bioRxiv. 2021 Jan 1.

2. Olson ND, Kumar MS, Li S, Braccia DJ, Hao S, Timp W, Salit ML, Stine OC, Bravo HC. A framework for assessing 16S rRNA marker-gene survey data analysis methods using mixtures. Microbiome. 2020 Dec;8(1):1-8.

3. Wagner J, Kancherla J, Braccia D, Matsumara J, Felix V, Crabtree J, Mahurkar A, Bravo HC. Interactive exploratory data analysis of Integrative Human Microbiome Project data using Metaviz. F1000Research. 2020;9.

Conferences

(BioConductor Europe 2020, MicrobiomeExperiment, link poster) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020

(Keystone Conference, Microbiome, link talk) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2021

Awards

National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (COMBINE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020-2021

Dean’s Fellowship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017, 2018, 2020

Travel Grant (COMBINE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2018

Research Experience for Physics Undergraduates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2015

Teaching Experience

Mammalian Physiology Laboratory

• BSCI 441, University of Maryland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020

Cell Biology and Physiology Laboratory

• BSCI 330, University of Maryland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017-2019

Introduction to Bioinformatics Workshop

• National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
• Assisted leading bioinformatics workshop for NIH employees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2018

Programming in R Workshop

• University of Maryland, College Park, MD
• Curated and assisted in leading workshop for R beginners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2018

Electricity and Magnetism Laboratory

• PHYS 212, Pennsylvania State University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2016