de Boer Lab
School of Biomedical Engineering, UBC
Sole supervisor for five co-op students on research projects I designed. I also mentor PhD students in the lab.
2023 – present
Teaching
Teaching and supervision.
For me, the best part of my job is training the next generation of scientists.
I am always looking for students to work with. Motivated graduate, undergraduate and high-school students interested in machine learning for genomics are welcome to write to me.
Mentorship
Students I have supervised.
Kevin Zhai
Computer Science and Statistics, UBC
pairFrag, genome-wide homology mapping. The paper is coming soon.
Winter 2025 – present
Samuel Lau
Engineering Physics, UBC
Yakformer: improving models with chromosome-scale naive DNA. The paper is coming soon.
Winter 2026
Justin Qian
Engineering Physics, UBC
nextFrag, benchmarking active learning strategies for sequence-to-expression models. Co-first author on the preprint.
Winter 2025 – Winter 2026
Björn Holst
Computer Science, UBC · SBME Synergy studentship
Figuring out which data composition would help us improve cis-regulatory models. The finding from this work led us to realize what kinds of sequences are most informative for training sequence-to-expression models, and to invent a sequence synthesis method for creating high-information-content sequence libraries.
Summer 2023
Hudson Nock
Engineering Physics, UBC
Benchmarking tools for interpreting neural networks that predict expression from DNA. The paper will be submitted soon.
Winter 2023
Bangladeshi Student Research Initiative
Founder
A non-profit connecting undergraduate and postgraduate students in Bangladesh with Bangladeshi researchers in academia and industry abroad, through free mentorship programmes. Mentees are matched across a volunteer network, so the students I mentor through it are separate from those I supervise in the lab. They do not work full time like my lab students, so I focus more on introducing them to good research habits than on finishing a project end-to-end.
2024 – present
Teaching assistantships
Courses I have taught.
Graduate Teaching Assistant — Master of Data Science
University of British Columbia
Eleven courses across the MDS curriculum, from supervised learning and regression through workflows, visualisation and cloud computing.
- DSCI 571: Supervised Learning I
- DSCI 572: Supervised Learning II
- DSCI 562: Regression II
- DSCI 553: Statistical Inference and Computation II
- DSCI 554: Experimentation and Causal Inference
- DSCI 573: Feature and Model Selection
- DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures
- DSCI 531: Data Visualization I
- DSCI 522: Data Science Workflows
- DSCI 525: Web and Cloud Computing
- DSCI 521: Computing Platforms for Data Science
Sep 2021 – Dec 2024
Graduate Teaching Assistant — Biology Program
University of British Columbia
- BIOL 234: Fundamentals of Genetics
May – Jun 2022
Graduate Teaching Assistant — Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Windsor
- ELEC 8330: Computational Intelligence
- GENG 2320: Engineering Software Fundamentals
Jan – Dec 2020