Student Profiles

Mike Verdicchio

After graduating from ASU in the spring of 2006, Mike Verdicchio continued his studies in computer science as a doctoral student and 2006-2007 Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering Fulton Fellow. As a third year graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Verdicchio works hard to find a balance between his research responsibilities, academic coursework and personal life. One of the ways he has overcome the challenges of being a graduate student is by managing his time wisely.

He describes his change in study habits and time management by saying , “It reminded me of undergraduate where I had a hard time taking 17 credit hours as a freshman with all 100 level classes but now I can do a week’s worth of freshman-level work on Tuesday.”

He adds that, “It was great a bit of work to keep my head above water. I’ve learned to work harder to handle more in less time, which is helpful since the workload continues to increase every semester.” Part of his time of as a graduate student is devoted to pursuing his research interests in biomedical informatics, biological systems modeling and mathematical, probabilistic and statistical applications in bioinformatics. In the summer of 2007, he accepted a paid internship with the Translational Genomics Research Institute through the Fulton School’s Engineering Internship Program (EIP) after having worked at TGen in 2005 as an unpaid intern. Verdicchio has also spent some of his time working as a Computer Science Graduate Teaching Assistant for CSE 110.  Ultimately, he plans to combine his interest in teaching and research by becoming a computer science professor at a major research university.

Becoming a professor will allow Verdicchio to walk in the footsteps of one of his mentors, SCI lecturer Faye Navabi. In 2001, Verdicchio took CSE 110 with Navabi. He then went on to be a CSE 110 undergraduate grader for two years and teaching assistant for two years under the guidance of Navabi. Verdicchio recently won the award for 2008 Outstanding Teaching Assistant from the Department of Computer Science for his work as a graduate teaching assistant with Navabi. In the summer of 2008, Verdicchio taught CSE 110 as a Faculty Associate where he had the opportunity to teach material that he had studied for approximately six years.

In addition to teaching, he presents his research at local and national conferences. One of his projects entitled, “Learning Causal Relationships Between Genes from Steady State Data: Algorithms, Simulation and Application,” will be [was] presented at Rocky ’08, a bioinformatics conference from the International Society for Computational Biology. Verdicchio is also involved in collaborative projects in varying capacities. For example, he devotes some of his research time towards a project entitled, “Interactive Computational Support for Systems Biology of Aging” with other SCI faculty and graduate students. Previous research on this topic resulted in the composition of detailed chart of cellular and metabolic interactions that influence human aging. With this research, he and his collaborators are building on this previous work by developing a computational framework for reasoning about human senescence.  This work will allow analysis of the human aging system, perform reasoning over current knowledge and provide a framework with which to model other diseases and disorders.

Verdicchio’s advisor is SCI Assistant Professor Seungchan Kim who also holds a research position at TGen. Under his mentorship, Verdicchio’s research will investigate how context-specific biological systems measured in terms of high-throughput heterogeneous data can be accurately modeled with a framework based on that of probabilistic graphical models, especially Bayesian networks. The beginnings of this work have resulted in a publication from Dr. Kim’s lab entitled “Context-Specific Gene Regulations in Gene Expression Cancer Data.” This publication was also was accepted to the 2009 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing  and featured Verdicchio as shared first authorship with SCI Ph.D. student Ina Sen. In the fall of 2008, Verdicchio will be working with his dissertation advisor, Seungchan Kim, as a Graduate Research Associate where he will begin work on his dissertation research.

Verdicchio participates in other professional development activities outside of the lab.  During the 2007-2008 academic year, Verdicchio participated in the Preparing Future Faculty Program. Even with his busy research schedule, he takes time to mentor students in the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI), a program he participated in as an undergraduate. He currently mentors bioengineering junior Milad Behbahaninia, a participant in the FURI program. Verdicchio provides Behbahaninia with guidance as Behbahaninia works on improving Bayesian network learning by incorporating biological knowledge into the process. After becoming a newlywed on October 18th, Verdicchio also spends time with his wife, Jacey.

In reflecting on his decision to attend graduate school, he offers this advice to future graduate students, “Go for the right reason and have a clear motivation about goals you are pursuing.”