News

NSF EAGER Award — Unveiling Security Risks to Scientific Integrity in AI-Driven Biological Discovery (SLU co-PI, ~$300K in total)
Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups Award — PUF–Blockchain Converged Security Technology (SLU PI, ~$1M in total, ~$300K for SLU)
Cory Gardner published “Wavelet-Enhanced PaDiM for Industrial Anomaly Detection” in IEEE Access [DOI]
Gihwan Jung published “Wildfire Smoke Detection” in Fire [DOI]
Welcome new students: Franklin Lamin, Usha Rani Lankalapalli, Seung Bum Jung, and Tanisha Londhe!

SC’25 DRBSD Workshop Best Paper Runner-Up Award (Workshop) (Paper)
Appointed Interim Associate Chair, Department of Computer Science, Saint Louis University
AI-Enhanced Spatial Transcriptomics SOM–SSE Collaborative Seed Grant (PI, $3K)
Cory Gardner’s SC’25 paper accepted on GPU-accelerated single-cell RNA-seq analysis
Published review paper in Briefings in Bioinformatics: blood and tissue microbiome analyses [DOI]
Welcome new students: Eric Nguyen, Seyun Jeong, Aendri Dhillon, and Zaheer Khan!
Aiden Moon (Parkway Central High School) will attend Stanford University in Fall 2026

Cory Gardner published his first first-author paper at Genome Research — Chromosome-level subgenome-aware de novo assembly of S. bayanus [DOI]
NSF CC* Award (ModernCARE $630K) to build GPU cluster for AI research at SLU (PI)
Summer AI-HPC hands-on tutorial at GIST, South Korea (GitHub)

Welcome, Cory Gardner started a CS Ph.D. program!
SLU Research Innovation Fund for developing T-Cell analysis platform (PI, $25K)
MegaD published in Life — Deep Learning for Disease Status Prediction of Metagenomic Samples [DOI]
Two papers at IEEE BIBM 2022 and IEEE COMPSAC 2022

MegaR published in BMC Bioinformatics (Eliza Dhungel and Yassin Mreyoud, Congrats!) [DOI]
iCAT published in F1000Research [DOI]
Korea Government ACT+ Funding Award (co-PI) — 25 nm X-ray Inspection System
Adjunct Professor appointment at GIST AI Graduate School

Tenured! (One year early)
CAMDA 2020 Best Presentation Award (Sadiya Ahmad and Cory Gardner, Congrats!)
Deep Neural Network paper at ACM-BCB 2020 (Yassin Mreyoud)
T-Cell Receptor paper at ACM-BCB 2020 (Tim Kosfeld)
Published in Gastroenterology (IF=22.682) and Gut (IF=17.943) — single-cell transcriptional analyses

Invited talk at Nestlé Purina PetCare, St. Louis, MO
Nestlé Purina PetCare research grant — Data-Driven Deep Analysis of Dog Gut Microbiomes (Sole-PI, $26.5K)
Published in Biology Direct, Database, Human Genomics
Invited talk at Kyungpook National University, South Korea
Multiple student graduations: Eliza Dhungel, Ahmad Rajeh, Courtney Schiebout, Matthew Mosior, Pallavi Gupta

Saint Louis University Scholarly Works Award
FBI Grant Award — Identifying and Tracking Virus-Specific TCR Clonotypes (Key Personnel, $100K share)
LONGO published in Bioinformatics (ISMB-2018) [DOI]
TCR paper published in Cell Reports (IF=9.423) [DOI]
Invited talk at KOCSEA 2018 Symposium, Silicon Valley, CA
Wenjia Feng graduated (BCB M.S.) — Bioinformatics Scientist at Washington University School of Medicine

NSF CRII Award ($174K) — Accelerating Human Microbiome Analysis (Sole-PI)
NSF S-STEM BITWISE Award ($650K) — Bioinformatics Training (co-PI)
Microsoft Research Award — Very Large Scale Metagenomics Analysis using Azure ($20K)
Amazon AWS Award — Metagenomic Sequence Analysis using Spark ($5K)
Invited talks at KISTI, GIST, and Ajou University, South Korea
First students join the lab: Alex Paul, Dylan Lawrence, James Gallien, Barry Hykes

Joined Saint Louis University as Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science