Kunal Poorey

Senior Member of Technical Staff

Portrait of Kunal Poorey

Kunal’s work at Sandia is mostly focused on the development of computational tools in biodefense, infectious diseases, microbiome, biomass/biofuel and microbial ecology. Kunal has also built software tools to analyze sequencing data and apply machine-learning techniques for RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, CLK-ChIP-seq, Tiling arrays, expression arrays, Metagenomics and Amplicon sequencing. Kunal’s current area of interests are: Data Science and Machine learning applications in biology, New method development in Genomics, Biofuels and Biomass production, Microbiome, Infectious Diseases, Antibiotic Resistance, Transcription Regulation and Chromatin Structure and Function.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree: Chemical Engineering, IIT-Bombay, Mumbai, India (2000-2004)

Master’s Degrees:

  • Civil Engineering, University of Virginia (2007)
  • Physical and Biosciences, University of Virginia (2007-2011)

Doctoral Degree: Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Virginia (2011-2014)

Postdoctoral Fellowships: Sandia National Laboratories (2014-2017)

Selected Publications

  • Poorey K, Viswanathan R, Craver MN, Karpova TS, McNelly JG, Bekiranov S, Auble DT. “Measuring Chromatin Interaction Dynamics on the Second-Time Scale at Single-Copy Genes.” Science Oct 2013.
  • Poorey K, Sprouse RO, Wells MN, Viswanathan R, Bekiranov S, Auble DT “RNA synthesis precision is regulated by preinitiation complex turnover.” Genome Res. 2010 Dec; 20(12):1679-88. Epub 2010 Sep 20.
  • Chen X, Poorey K, Wells MN, Muller U, Bekiranov S, Auble DT, Brow DA., Transcriptomes of six mutants in the Sen1 pathway reveal combinatorial control of transcription termination across the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. PLoS Genetics 2017.
  • Bent ZW, Poorey K, LaBauve AE, Hamblin RY, Williams KP, and Meagher RJ. A Rapid Spin Column-Based Method to Enrich Pathogen Transcripts from Eukaryotic Host Cells Prior to Sequencing. PLoS ONE Dec 2016
  • Bent ZW, Poorey K, Brazel DM, LaBauve AE, Sinha A, Curtis DJ, Tew KE, Hamblin RY, Williams KP, Branda SS, Young GM, and Meagher RJ. “A Transcriptomic Analysis of Yersinia enterocolitica biovar 1B Infecting Murine Macrophages Reveals New Mechanisms of Extracellular and Intracellular Survival” Infect Immun. Apr 2015.
  • Li M, Valsakumar V, Poorey K, Bekiranov S, Smith JS. “Genome-wide Analysis of Functional Sirtuin Chromatin Targets in Yeast.” Genome Biol. May 2013.
  • Hyland EM, Molina H, Poorey K, Jie C, Xie Z, Dai J, Qian J, Bekiranov S, Auble DT, Pandey A, Boeke JD. “An evolutionarily ‘young’ lysine residue in histone H3 attenuates transcriptional output in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.” Genes Dev. June 2011.
  • Wade SL, Poorey K, Bekiranov S, Auble DT “The Snf1 kinase and proteasome-associated Rad23 regulate UV-responsive gene expression.” EMBO J. 2009 Oct 7;28(19):2919-31