About
Hello! My name is Benjamin Kramer, and I am a research assistant at the University of Chicago in the lab of Professor Andrey Rzhetsky. I graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics with a Minor in Mathematics, and spent a year as a visiting student at the University of Oxford.
My research interests lie in computational biology, epidemiology, and the medical sciences. My current work focuses on large-scale analysis of electronic health records, disease modeling, and phenome-wide association studies.
My non-academic interests include boxing and chess. I also enjoy reading philosophy, particularly relating to Aristotelianism and Kant and have an interest in Classical Greece, Rome and the Byzantine Empire.
Current research…
- The University of Chicago with Dr. Andrey Rzhetsky and Dr. Megan Huisingh-Scheetz, working on computational epidemiology using 200M+ claims records, sibling-based study designs for complex disease, and deep learning models for frailty prediction.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Bryan Bryson in the Department of Biological Engineering, building single-cell RNA-sequencing atlases of human skin myeloid cells across 35+ datasets and 500,000+ cells, applying CellTypist models to tuberculosis granuloma analysis, and implementing de novo protein design pipelines using RFDiffusion and ProteinMPNN.
Previous research experience includes…
- The CWRU Department of Physiology and Biophysics with Drs. Jeffrey Garvin and Agustin Gonzalez-Vicente focusing on the renal system through experiments and bioinformatics. My first publication and abstracts are related to this work.
- The UC Berkeley Department of Public Health during an REU with Professor Misbath Daouda. I analyzed air pollution through satellite data in West Africa, using statistical modelling through Python, with all original visualizations here.
- Different CWRU Departments as a teaching assistant for a few memorable courses, with multiple outside my specialization. Giving lectures recitations for thermodynamics greatly increased my fondness for physics!
Non-academic job experience includes…
- New Sun Road for two summers, a startup out of UC Berkeley’s ERG. I performed hardware/software QC on the StellarEdge Internet of Things (IoT) controller and contributed to light development to the StellarEdge’s display board firmware.
- The City of Oakland, in particular District 4 (West + Downtown Oakland). I created district databases for locations, requests, and solicitations in Python and performed policy analysis on revenue generated by Measure HH’s Sugar Sweetened Beverage Distribution Tax.