Marion Riggs, PhD

Marion “Joe” Riggs is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Department of Biomedical Informatics. Riggs earned his PhD in the Integrative Life Science Program at Virginia Commonwealth University where he focused on culture adaptation of genomically altered human pluripotent stem cells. Dissertation work led to phenotypic validation of a novel gene for the scale-up and expansion of stem cells and the development of a biologically relevant system for assaying culture-induced selective advantage of stem cells. Riggs’ computational biology group specializes in the development of methods for statistical and integrative analysis of cellular functional states using all types of high-throughput and massively parallel data. His personal focus is the implemention of wet-lab experiments and the associated bioinformatics analyses. As such, he “very much enjoys the highly dynamic, challenging, collaborative environment of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, where our group is applying cutting-edge methodologies to research questions at the forefront of biological discovery and scientific understanding.” As part of a large collaborative experimental group studying the genetic basis of neuropsychiatric illness, his work centers on chromatin modeling and epigenetic factors in this disease spectrum using human cellular models. In his spare-time, Riggs promotes the expansion of the Student Society for Stem Cell Research (SSSCR).

Previous Education

• PhD, Virginia Commonwealth University