Center for Biomedical Data Sciences

Courtney Montgomery, Ph.D., is the director of the CBDS and a professor in the Genes & Human Disease Research Program. She has over a decade of experience in directing Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Cores for Centers of Research Translation (CRT) and Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grants including managing a team of skilled biostatisticians, bioinformaticians, statistical geneticists, and data administrators. She was named the founding Director of the CBDS beginning May 2023. Her extensive training and experience in biomedical data sciences includes statistics, genetic epidemiology, and bioinformatics. As a member of the Human Genetic Analysis Resource at Case Western Reserve University, she spent several years working on the development and refinement of methodology for statistical analysis of genetic data, with a special emphasis on highly correlated hierarchical data modeling methods. She has been the PI of multiple NIH and foundation grants and leads a team of statisticians and programmers that is involved in a variety of clinical, translational, and basic science projects. Her specific research interests include the genetics of sarcoidosis and other autoimmune disorders, as well as the development and application of novel statistical and bioinformatics approaches to large-scale, high-dimension data.

Christopher Bottoms, Ph.D., is a Senior Bioinformatics Trainer/Analyst with over two decades’ experience using GNU/Linux, Bash, and programming languages, thirteen years’ experience with git, twelve years’ experience using HPC clusters, and a decade’s experience using Slurm. He has a strong background in biology, genetics, and protein structures and previously served as the senior Programmer/Analyst at the University of Missouri Bioinformatics Analytics Core. His past work included numerous plant- and animal-based model systems and multiple sequencing and analytical platforms.

David Stanford, Ph.D., is a Senior Bioinformatics Trainer/Analyst with almost 20 years of experience in high dimension data. He completed graduate studies in biochemistry of tumor metastasis and molecular biology (DNA sequencing, genomics and RNA-protein interactions) at Washington State University as well as the management and operation of a Sanger sequencing and flow cytometry core where he helped build the bioinformatic infrastructure for the Institute for Personalized Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine. Since moving to the OMRF in 2014, he has been involved in bioinformatic analysis of epigenomic and other high-throughput sequencing data.

Nathan Pezant, MS, is a Senior Data Analyst in the CBDS. He has Master’s degrees in both Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His past work focused on the bias and accuracy of gene expression classification models under various resampling schemes. Since joining OMRF in 2016, Mr. Pezant has provided analyses and consultations to many researchers at OMRF and surrounding research institutions. Mr. Pezant has experience with many types of genetic and clinical data as well as programming and scripting languages.

Gideon Hallum, MS, is a Bioinformatics Project Manager in the CBDS. He serves as liaison between CBDS staff and other OMRF personnel including scheduling, project tracking, and other administrative reports. He has a Master’s Degree in Biostatistics and experience in survival analysis, sample size calculation, and cancer research and is versed in multiple programming languages and data types.