Elena Harris

Elena Harris is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at California State University, Chico. Her research focuses on bioinformatics, data mining, and algorithms, with specializations in malaria parasite genomics, DNA methylation analysis, and computational tools for genomic data. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside, and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California studying gene expression and methylation in mammalian cells.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, Riverside

Research Interests: Dr. Harris develops bioinformatics tools like BRAT and BRAT-BW for analyzing bisulfite-treated sequencing data. Her projects include nucleosome positioning studies, transcription factor binding site prediction, and genome-wide methylation mapping. She has contributed to malaria parasite research, revealing epigenetic mechanisms in Plasmodium falciparum. Recent work explores computational efficiency in large-scale genome analysis via FM-index construction.

Grants & Advising: Collaborates on interdisciplinary bioinformatics education frameworks and teaches CSCI 581 (Artificial Intelligence) and CSCI 582 (Bioinformatics). Active in mentoring students through projects involving next-generation sequencing technologies.

Labs & Teams: Former lab collaborations include Dr. Stefano Lonardi (UCR) for malaria genomics and Dr. Andrew Smith (USC) for mammalian epigenetics. Engaged in hardware acceleration research for genomic data processing.