Grad student Elior Rahmani is visiting ICSI, working with Eran Halperin of Research Initiatives’ bioinformatics team. Eran splits his time between ICSI and Tel Aviv, where he advises Elior.

Elior recently received his bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University in Computer science and Biology (Bioinformatics); he began his master’s degree studies recently. His work, and that of Eran’s group in Tel Aviv, is in the field of population genetics and specifically the development of computational and statistical tools for the analysis of genetic variation. Elior works on a project that seeks to use multiple kinds of biological data to predict phenotypes. Many genetic population studies attempt to find genetic variants that are correlated with phenotypes and diseases. This project attempts to gain more information on the problem's input by incorporating additional related biological data types, which will hopefully lead to better predictions and improved statistical power as a result. At this point, the project (as well as Elior’s master’s studies) is in its early exploratory stages.

Elior is also involved in a project at Intel. The project’s general topic, the Internet of Things, holds that, one day, most of the objects around us will be connected in an Internet-like structure. Intel has begun to deploy this idea in a research context by collecting data from participants’ wearable devices to gain insights about diseases.