Shannon Quinn

Shannon Quinn is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Computer Science and Cellular Biology Departments at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on scalable machine learning, computer vision, and generative modeling applied to public health challenges such as ciliary motion analysis, pathogen motility (e.g., Toxoplasma gondii), and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's. She leads interdisciplinary projects emphasizing open science principles, including open-source tool development (e.g., CiliaWeb, ORNet) and reproducible bioimaging analysis.

Education: PhD in Computational Biology (Carnegie Mellon-UPitt), MS in Computational Biology (Carnegie Mellon), BS in Computer Science (Georgia Tech). She holds affiliations with the IDEAS Institute, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Institute of Bioinformatics at UGA.

Key research areas include: 1) Cilia motion analysis for ciliopathy diagnosis, 2) Spatiotemporal modeling of organelle dynamics, 3) Biosurveillance via social media analytics, and 4) Representation learning for biomedical imaging. She has received NSF CAREER awards and Scialog funding, and was named a Lilly Teaching Fellow (2017–2019).

Her lab collaborates with researchers across disciplines, including Prof. Karl Lechtreck (Cellular Biology), Prof. Frederick Quinn (Infectious Diseases), and Prof. Tianming Liu (Computer Science). Notable tools developed include ORNet (organelle network modeling) and CiliaWeb (ciliary motion platform).

Awards include NSF grants totaling over $5M, multiple teaching and research awards, and contributions to open-source projects like Apache Mahout and scikit-learn.