Peter Halmos

Hi! I’m a CS PhD student at Princeton University and am fortunate to be advised by Ben Raphael. I previously graduated from Columbia University as a Computer Science major with a concentration in Chemistry. At Columbia and the New York Genome Center, I worked with David Knowles, who introduced me to the intersection of machine learning and computational biology.

Contact: ph3641 [at] princeton [dot] edu | Office: 35 Olden Street

Research Interests

My research lies at the intersection of pure machine learning and computational biology. I am interested in the computational and mathematical aspects of optimal transport, including low-rank and neural optimal transport, as well as flow-based generative models. My focus is on developing and adapting these tools to quantitatively infer developmental trajectories in single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and to understand the dynamics of cell differentiation in space and time.

Publications

Preprints

Previous Research Projects

• I worked at Foundation Medicine as an undergraduate, supervised by Justin Newberg, Garrett Frampton, and Megan Montesion. I contributed to two projects accepted to AACR 2020:
  • Pan-chromosome analysis does not reveal parental or ancestral bias in chromosome loss of heterozygosity
  • Pan-cancer analysis of sex differences and their associations with ancestry and genomic biomarkers in a large comprehensive genomic profiling dataset

Teaching

I was previously a teaching assistant for Organic Chemistry at Columbia with Professor Talha Siddiqui. I also teach Computer Science at the King Summer Institute, where I've taught an introductory Java course.

Other

Outside of my academic interests, I am an avid hiker and an amateur birder, botanist, and photographer. Credits for this website template go to Elena Gribelyuk, who I shamelessly lifted this from.