Sean McKinney, Ph.D., joined the Stowers Institute in 2009 as the group head of Optics Development. He was named manager of Microscopy in 2015, head in 2019, and in 2023 he was appointed Head of Computational Imaging.

Sofia Robb graduated with a B.S. degree in biology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore in 1999. She began integrating scripting and the use of databases with her experiments while working as a technician in the laboratory of Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institute.

Robb remained with the Sánchez Alvarado Lab after its move to the University of Utah for her doctoral work where she studied histone modifying enzymes and their role in stem cells and regeneration in the planarian flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. She also constructed numerous genomic tools for this emerging non-model organism and continued integrating the genome with bioinformatic tools as a postdoctoral associate at the University of California, Riverside with Jason Stajich, Ph.D., and Susan Wessler, Ph.D., studying active transposable elements in rice.

At the Stowers Institute, Robb is involved in several genomics initiatives, including establishing a collection of tools for the analysis of genomes and genome-wide data of research organisms.

As a biomathematician, Boris Rubinstein primarily assists Stowers researchers with complex data analysis, modeling, and numerical/symbolic programming but his expertise extends to biophysical and systems biology questions, image processing and analysis, and protein interaction network analysis.

Chris Seidel is an experienced bench biologist who leverages his experimental background when developing approaches for big data analysis. He works closely with Stowers researchers to develop and execute strategies for bringing genomics to bear on biological problems, including experimental design, data analysis, development of novel reagents, and bioinformatics.

Seidel grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He completed graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, studying transcription elongation in the laboratory of Caroline Kane, Ph.D.. He has worked in the biotech industry as a senior scientist and led a small team of researchers to develop the first bioinformatically optimized reagents for spotted microarray production, including an array to tackle malaria in collaboration with Joseph DeRisi, Ph.D., at the University of California, San Francisco.

After building microarray robots at the University of California, Berkeley, and Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute, Seidel joined the Stowers Institute where he develops novel genomic approaches and analysis pipelines and continues to do research in genomics.