HGEN Leadership

David Samuels PhD, Director of Graduate Studies

Dr. Samuels is responsible for program strategy, curriculum, and teaching coordination.

Dr. Samuels began his academic career with a PhD in computational physics from the University of Oregon in 1990.  His first post-doctoral position was as an independent research fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford and at NASA Ames Research Center where he used the then state-of-the-art supercomputers at NASA for computationally modeling superfluid turbulence.  He then moved to a post-doctoral position at Emory University where he began his computational biology career by modeling the growth of axons and dendrites from developing neurons. In 1996 he moved to a faculty position in the School of Mathematics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where he started a long-term collaboration with one of the leading genetic medicine research groups globally and began work in medical research with a specialty in mitochondrial genetics. Dr. Samuels was a faculty member at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (2001-2009) and he moved to Vanderbilt to join what was then the Center for Human Genetics Research in 2009. For the past 20 years Dr. Samuels has concentrated on biomedical research. His collaborative research has successfully combined experimental and computational methods to yield more than 200 peer reviewed papers. Dr. Samuels has been mentoring PhD students for almost 25 years and has directly supervised 9 PhD students and 4 post-docs in that time.

 Rosalind (Roz) Johnson, HGEN Program Coordinator

Mrs. Johnson is responsible for the day-to-day management and operations of the HGEN graduate program. She is the first point of contact for students with questions regarding course and curriculum issues.