My name is Basheer Becerra (pronounced as BUH-sheer
beh-SEH-ruh).
I am currently a third year PhD
candidate in Bioinformatics & Integrative Genomics (BIG)
attending Harvard Medical School. I graduated from
Illinois State University with a double major in computer science
and statistics and a biology minor.
My thesis work (with co-advisors Dr. Luca
Pinello and Dr. Daniel Bauer) involves
leveraging emerging CRISPR-Cas genome editing tools such as base-editors to perform screens
to understand the function coding and non-coding sequences and SNPs. As induction of fetal
hemoglobin serves as an opportunity for therapeutic intervention of beta-hemoglobinopathy,
these screens aim to identify regulatory elements of fetal hemoglobin.
This work is a part of the NHGRI IGVF initiative.
From this work, I specifically:
-
Perform and develop generalizable screening approaches in the lab for characterizing
non-coding and
coding elements.
- Develop upstream and downstream computational methods for screen
design and analysis, respectively.
General summary of professional/research experiences and goals
G3 Bioinformatics Ph.D. student with experimental and computational skills specifically in genome editing screens, statistics and machine-learning, and software engineering.
Specifically, I am interested in developing screening approaches and computational methods used to study biological mechanisms (i.e. regulatory mechanisms of non-coding elements) and identify therapeutic targets (i.e. induction of fetal hemoglobin for beta-hemoglobinopathies).
Publications
Ganz, J., Maury, E.A., Becerra, B., Bizzotto, S., Doan, R.N., Kenny, C.J., Shin, T., Kim, J., Zhou, Z., Ligon, K.L. and Lee, E.A., 2021. Rates and patterns of clonal oncogenic mutations in the normal human brain. Cancer Discovery.
Rube, H.T., Rastogi, C., Feng, S., Kribelbauer, J.F., Li, A., Becerra, B., Melo, L.A., Do, B.V., Li, X., Adam, H.H. and Shah, N.H., 2021. Probing molecular specificity with deep sequencing and biophysically interpretable machine learning. bioRxiv.