Computational & Quantitative Biology (CQB) Faculty

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Professor of Engineering, and Microbiology and Immunology

Thayer School of Engineering

Office: 119B Cummings Hall


Phone: 603-646-9922

The Ackerman laboratory conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of biomedical and engineering sciences: developing high throughput tools to evaluate the antibody response in disease states ranging from infection to cancer in order to aid in therapeutic antibody and vaccine design and development, and to understand the protective mechanism of antibodies using approaches grounded in fundamental engineering principles utilizing protein evolution, molecular biology, and mathematical modeling.

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Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Office:  223 Life Sciences Center

Phone:  603-646-9926

My lab seeks to uncover how cell size, zygotic genome activation, chromatin regulation, and the cell cycle come together to regulate early development in the Drosophila embryo. We use a combination of quantitative imaging, cell biology, genetics, genomics, biochemistry, and mathematical modeling to answer questions about how cells sense fundamental biological properties such as their size and developmental stage.

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Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

Geisel School of Medicine

Office:  507A Vail

Phone:  

My laboratory's research examines the interaction between bacterial and viral pathogens in the respiratory tract, particularly in the setting of chronic lung diseases, like Cystic Fibrosis (CF). Current studies in the lab are focused on elucidating molecular mechanisms that govern the innate immune induction of biofilm growth in the lung. Translating the laboratory's bench studies to the bedside, our team collaborates with physicians in Otolaryngology and Pulmonary Medicine to examine viral-bacterial interactions in the upper and lower respiratory tracts of patients with chronic lung disease. We use a combination of live-cell imaging, microbiological, cell biological and cutting-edge genomics approaches with the long-term goal of identifying new therapeutic targets to disrupt and/or prevent the chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm infections that are so devastating to people with CF.

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Nathan Smith Professor of Genetics, Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Office: 702 Remsen

Phone: 603-646-5247

Work in the Dunlap lab is directed towards understanding circadian biology, the means by which biological clocks operate, are reset by the environment, and control the metabolism of cells. More recently a second effort has nucleated around high throughput functional genomics of filamentous fungi including Neurospora and Aspergillus spp.

No longer accepting new thesis students.

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H. Robert Frost, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Biomedical Data Science, and Molecular and Systems Biology

Office:  Rubin 704

Phone:  603-667-1884

My research focuses on the development of bioinformatics and biostatistics methods for analyzing high-dimensional genomic data with a specific emphasis on single cell transcriptomics. Areas of statistical interest include dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA), hypothesis aggregation (e.g., gene set testing), and penalized estimation (e.g., LASSO penalized regression). Areas of biological interest include cell signaling, tissue-specific gene activity, tumor immunology, and cancer prognosis prediction.

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Assistant Professor of Engineering, and Molecular and Systems Biology

Thayer School of Engineering

Office:   ESCS 121

Phone:  603-646-2368

The Goods Lab solves problems at the intersection of engineering, the immune system, and reproductive health by improving our understanding of biology and by developing tools and systems biology approaches to understand, manipulate, and integrate biological knowledge. The long-term goal of Dr. Goods' research is to improve the lives of people by building a better understanding of the interplay between reproductive health and immunology, and translating those insights into therapeutics, diagnostics, and novel ways of both studying and monitoring reproductive and overall health.

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Associate Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology

Office: 601 Vail

Phone: 603-646-5249

Our research focus is the cerebral cortex, an area of the brain that serves as the biological substrate for the higher cognitive functions that define us as individuals. We wish to identify the mechanisms by which individual cortical neurons process and transmit information within the cortical circuit. To accomplish this we employ electrical and optical recording techniques that measure neuronal activity in neocortical neurons under a variety of experimental conditions.


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Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Office: 350 Life Sciences Center

Phone: 603-646-2649 


I am interested in how complex tissue and organ structures arise from simple tissue primordia. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining genetics, cell biology, biophysics and mathematical modeling, we seek to understand how developmental patterning information controls individual cell shape changes and how they are integrated into stereotyped tissue-scale deformations.


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Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Biomedical Data Science, and Microbiology and Immunology

Office: 888 Rubin

Phone: 603-653-6087


Our work is on the development of the microbiome in infants and children, and the associations between environmental and dietary exposures, the microbiome, and risk for infectious diseases and other health outcomes.


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Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Thomas S. Kosasa Professor at Geisel School of Medicine

Office: 208 Vail

Phone: 603-646-5371

We study the mechanisms by which bacterial and fungal pathogens regulate virulence determinants within multicellular populations, within microbial communities and in the context of mammalian hosts.


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Director of Norris Cotton Cancer Center

Preston T. and Virginia R. Kelsey Distinguished Chair in Cancer

Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology

Office: DH, Rubin Building, Room 801

Phone: 603-653-3611 


The Leach lab studies pancreatic developmental, epithelial and tumor biology, using mouse, zebrafish and human model sytems. 


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Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Office:    413 Remsen

Phone:    603/646-5896

My research group investigates meiotic cell cycle regulation and chromosome segregation in budding yeast and mouse oogenesis. Our goal is to understand how checkpoint mechanisms monitor cell cycle events, how kinetochores attach to microtubules, and how both meiotic divisions are regulated to ensure faithful chromosome segregation. We use a combination of live cell imaging, cell biology, biochemistry, and genetics in our studies. 

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Ralph and Marjorie Crump Assistant Professor of Engineering

Thayer School of Engineering

Office:  ECSC 135J

Phone:  603-646-3485

The Lee Lab studies the dynamics of antibody repertoires in infectious disease, autoimmune disease, and cancer using high-throughput sequencing of B cell transcripts and high-resolution mass spectrometry. The repertoire of antibody molecules circulating in blood or coating mucosal surfaces is the basis for protective immunity, and we employ machine learning frameworks, big data analytics tools, proteomic analytical methods, and data modeling to gain clinically relevant insights regarding protective mechanisms at unprecedented details. Leveraging this knowledge, we aim to design next-generation therapeutics and vaccines precisely tailored to maximize effectiveness in the context of particular diseases and/or patients (i.e. personalized/precision medicine).

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Assistant Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology

Office:  658 Williamson Translational Research Building

Phone:  603-650-1866

My lab is interested in how cells grow and divide to form complex structures, such as the transformation from the zygote to an adult human or from a transformed cell into a tumor mass. To study these processes, we develop technologies to trace pattern of cell divisions which recovers the lineage of each cell. This information can be combined with other measures of cell state such as single-cell transcriptomic data to develop a rich picture of how choices are made in development and how this process is dysregulated in diseases such as cancer.

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Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Office: 326 Life Sciences Center

Phone: 603-646-1019


Bacteria often live in groups, called biofilms, where they cooperate and compete using a broad spectrum of interactive behaviors. These interactions are central to how bacteria evolve, and how they cause disease. We use molecular genetics, confocal microscopy, computational simulations, and evolutionary analysis to understand the mechanisms and biofilm-scale consequences of bacterial cell-cell interaction.


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Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Office:  203 Burke

Phone:  603-646-2270

The Robustelli laboratory integrates computational methods with biophysical experiments to obtain atomic-level descriptions of the functional motions of biomolecules, with a particular interest in intrinsically disordered proteins.  We aim to use insights from atomistic molecular simulations to understand, predict and design binding interactions of dynamic of disordered proteins and to elucidate general principles governing molecular recognition in dynamic systems.  A current focus of our laboratory is understanding the thermodynamic driving forces of small molecule ligands binding to disordered protein sequences, with the goal of providing new avenues to therapeutic interventions in diseases associated with disordered protein dysfunction through the rational design of small molecule and biologic inhibitors.

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Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

Office:  504A Vail Building

Phone:  603-646-5388

The bacteria resident in the human gastrointestinal tract (the gut microbiota) potently influence diverse aspects of human health, including immunity. However, the forces that govern the composition of the gut microbiota are poorly understood. Our work focuses on a mechanistic, ecological, and evolutionary understanding of how interbacterial interactions between members of the dominant Gram-negative bacteria in the gut, the Bacteroidales, modulate the composition of the microbiota. The Bacteroidales utilize a contact-dependent toxin-delivery system known as the type VI secretion system (T6SS) to kill neighboring cells. We study the impact of this pathway on the microbiota and how bacteria adapt to defend against T6SS-mediated antagonism, using a combination of bacterial genetics, biochemistry, metagenomics, and germ-free mouse models. We are also interested in understanding why Bacteroidales abundance is depleted in individuals with cystic fibrosis, with the goal of improving health through restoration of these bacteria.

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Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, and Cancer Biology Program

Office:  659 Williamson Translational Research Building

Phone:  603-646-5496

The broad goal of Dr. Salas's research is to investigate how cell heterogeneity impacts human populations health and disease, emphasizing how genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors model the human epigenome and, therefore, cell plasticity. Dr. Salas' laboratory studies how some key epigenetic mechanisms (DNA methylation, DNA hydroxymethylation, chromatin accessibility, and miRNA alterations) affect gene expression and cancer outcomes, including how the immune cells are altered in this disease.

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Thomas E Kurtz Professor, Professor of Engineering, Microbiology and Immunology, Physics, Molecular and Systems Biology

Office: 507A Vail

Phone: 603-646-6821


Synthetic analog and digital biological circuits in electri-cigenic and other microbes; Applications of synthetic and systems biology to immunology, infectious disease, and cancer; Precision measurement, electronic circuit modeling, and feedback control of living cells at the fundamental limits set by physics.

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Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

Office: 206 Vail

Phone: 603-646-5390

The Schultz lab develops quantitative approaches to study the emergence, operation and optimization of the gene networks that control cell responses in bacteria, with a focus on antibiotic resistance mechanisms. We combine mathematical modeling, bioinformatics, experimental evolution and microfluidics to analyze how the cell controls the expression of resistance genes during drug responses. We strive to guide innovation in clinical therapies by uncovering the selective pressures that shape the evolution of antibiotic resistance in natural environments.

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Andrew C. Vail Memorial Professor

Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and of Physiology

Office: 615 Remsen

Phone: 603-646-5395

Our laboratory studies the genetic disease Cystic Fibrosis. In particular we study host pathogen interactions between bacteria and human airway epithelial cells and the interactome of CFTR and how interacting proteins regulate CFTR trafficking. We also examine how environmental toxins, in particular arsenic, cause and contribute to respiratory and diseases and inflammation.


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Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology

Chair of Biomedical Data Sciences

Office: 330 Williamson Translational Research Building

Phone: 603-650-1105 


The complexities of biological systems can now be studied with genome-wide approaches that take a global view of the underlaying biology. 


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Siming Zhao, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Sciences, and Dartmouth Cancer Center

Cancer Biology Program

Office:   Rubin Building 705

Phone:  (603) 646-5723

Dr. Zhao's research focuses on studying the genetic etiology of human diseases, in particular, cancer.  Her lab develops computational methods and tools to analyze large-scale genomic datasets, aiming to translate data into biological insights. Specific areas of interest include modeling of mutation selection in cancer, genotype-phenotype association analysis, integration of multiple types of genomic datasets for disease gene discovery and single cell genomics.

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Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Office: 333 Life Sciences Center

Phone: 603-646-8616


My lab's research focus is to better understand evolution of microbes through computational analyses of genomic and metagenomic data.


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