Joshua Kangas

Assistant Teaching Professor of Computational Biology

Josh is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computational Biology Department in the School of Computer Science where he also earned his Ph.D. under Dr. Robert F. Murphy.  His Ph.D. studies were primarily focused on the development and application of automated science methods for drug discovery and development.  From that work, he and Dr. Murphy co-founded a company called Quantitative Medicine which offered an automated science-oriented software service to improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical research.  Afterward, he returned to Carnegie Mellon and discovered a passion for Computational Biology education in the context of biology labs.  His teaching was primarily focused on giving students experience with experimental design and execution at the interface of lab experimentation (data generation) and computation (data modeling and analysis). 

Since then, he was involved in starting two new programs.  First, he and Dr. Phillip Compeau (also from Computational Biology) founded the first high school program focused on Computational Biology with an emphasis on both the laboratory techniques and the implementation of algorithms needed for analysis of DNA sequence data.  Second, Josh helped to start the first M.S. Automated Science Biological Experimentation program in the world. 

Although the age range he teaches has been extended to include high school and Ph.D. students and everyone in between, the laboratory courses he teaches are still focused on the interface of computation (including machine learning and modeling), biological data generation (sequencing, microscopy, cytometry, etc.), and artificial intelligence-directed laboratory automation.

Josh has a variety of research interests he pursues primarily in service of offering exciting experimental opportunities for students in the courses he teaches.  With his high school and some undergraduate students, he and Dr. Compeau have taken boat trips to study the bacteria living in the three rivers of Pittsburgh.  With M.S. students, his students have taught a robot, originally designed for biological experiments, to play the game “Battleship” experimentally. In his graduate courses, M.S. and Ph.D. students have even studied potential treatments for venomous snake bite victims from all over the world. He continues to look for exciting opportunities to incorporate modern experimentation into his computational biology lab courses.