Laura Tipton, Ph.D.

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Biography

Dr. Tipton is excited to be joining the Chaminade faculty in data science. With a background in statistics and computational biology, Dr. Tipton’s research has focused on microbial communities, or microbiomes. She has ongoing collaborations with researchers at the University of Hawaii Manoa that include both environmental and host-associated microbiomes. One of the major goals of her research is to predict and examine the interactions between the microbial members of the microbiome, including both bacteria and fungi. Many of the analyses involved have to be adapted from other fields, including machine learning and computer science, making data science a perfect home Dr. Tipton.

Education

Most recently, Dr. Tipton completed a post-doc at UH Manoa examining fungi in the air for which she was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Microbiome of the Built Environment fellowship. Prior to that, Dr. Tipton did her Ph.D. at the Carnegie Mellon University-University of Pittsburgh joint program in Computational Biology, with a stint as a visiting graduate student at New York University. She also holds an MS in statistics from George Washington University and a BA in biostatistics from the University of Virginia.

Academic Degrees

Ph.D. in Computational Biology, University of Pittsburg
M.S. in Statistics, George Washington University
B.A. in Biostatistics, University of Virginia

Selected Publications

1. Tipton, L., Zahn, G. et al. Fungal aerobiota are not affected by time nor environment over a 13-y time series at the Mauna Loa Observatory. PNAS 116, 51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116
2. Tipton, L., Müller, C.L., Kurtz, Z.D. et al. Fungi stabilize connectivity in the lung and skin microbial ecosystems. Microbiome 6, 12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116
3. Tipton, L., Cuenco, K.T., Huang, L. et al. Measuring associations between the microbiota and repeated measures of continuous clinical variables using a lasso-penalized generalized linear mixed model. BioData Mining 11, 12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116
4. Morris, A., Paulson, J.N., Talukder, H., Tipton, L. et al. Longitudinal analysis of the lung microbiota of cynomolgous macaques during long-term SHIV infection. Microbiome 4, 38 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116
5. Cui, L., Lucht, L., Tipton, L. et al. Topographic diversity of the respiratory tract mycobiome and alteration in HIV and lung disease. AJRCCM 191, 8 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116