The two UMIACS faculty members are active in three of the 17 projects recently chosen to split $3 million in seed funding from the University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State.

A multi-institutional team that includes Associate Professor Rob Patro (left in photo) and Ph.D. student Dongze He (right) has released a toolkit for the efficient processing of single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing data.

The grant will assist in the development of software that provides a rapid analysis of biological sequence data.

The cross-institutional project, which uses machine learning to analyze wearable sensor data, could lead to more accurate and earlier diagnoses of people suffering from Parkinson’s.

The work is funded by a $77,500 seed grant from the UMD Brain and Behavior Institute.

He played a key role as part of a team that developed Sailfish, an open-source software tool for the quantification of gene expression from RNA sequencing data.