Randy Ellis, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School

Randy Ellis, 2023

Email

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CURRENTLY

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chirag Patel’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School working on neurodegenerative disease using human biobank data including brain imaging, electronic health records, genomics, and methods from machine learning and statistical modeling.

PREVIOUSLY

In 2023, I spent 8 months as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University working on single-cell genomics and calcium imaging analysis.

In 2022, I earned my PhD in Yasmin Hurd’s lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, supported by F31 (NIDA) and T32 (NIGMS) National Research Service Awards. I worked at the interface of genomics, machine learning, and behavioral neuroscience to understand the molecular underpinnings of substance use disorders.

From 2017-2018, I was a rotation student in Avi Ma’ayan’s lab and developed machine learning algorithms to predict diagnosis of substance use disorders using electronic medical records.

From 2015-2017, I was a postbac in Michael Michaelides’ lab at the National Institute on Drug Abuse on an Intramural Research Training Award. In Dr. Michaelides’ lab I worked on a variety of projects including the decoding of natural scenes from calcium imaging data curated by the Allen Institute, designer receptor activated by designer drug (DREADD) actuator metabolism, the effects of zinc on cocaine-seeking, the effects of obesity on GPCR signaling in striatonigral and striatopallidal medium spiny neurons, and a chapter on neuroimaging similarities between substance use and overeating disorders.

In 2014, I graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a B.S. in Neuroscience & Behavior and a Minor in Psychology. While at FAU, I pursued research in coordination dynamics in the lab of J. A. Scott Kelso, and neural circuits underlying cognitive behaviors, along with the pharmacology of affective disorders in the lab of Robert Vertes.

PUBLICATIONS
  1. Luo, R., Zeraatkar, D., Glymour, M., Ellis, R. J., Estiri, H., Patel, C. J. Specification curve analysis to identify heterogeneity in risk factors for dementia: findings from the UK Biobank BMC Medicine, 22(1), 216.
  2. Ferland, J. M. N., Ellis, R. J., Betts, G., Silveira, M. M., de Firmino, J. B., Winstanley, C. A., & Hurd, Y. L. Long-Term Outcomes of Adolescent THC Exposure on Translational Cognitive Measures in Adulthood in an Animal Model and Computational Assessment of Human Data. JAMA Psychiatry, 80(1), 66-76 (2023).
  3. Ellis, R. J. Questionable Research Practices, Low Statistical Power, and Other Obstacles to Replicability: Why Preclinical Neuroscience Research Would Benefit from Registered Reports. eNeuro (2022).
  4. Ellis, R. J., Sander, R. M., Limon, A. Twelve key challenges in medical machine learning and solutions. Intelligence-Based Medicine (2022).
  5. Ferland, J.-M. N., Ellis, R. J., Rompala, G., Landry, J. A., Callens, J. E., Ly, A., Frier, M. D., Uzamere, T. O., Hurd, Y. L. Dose mediates the protracted effects of adolescent THC exposure on reward and stress reactivity in males relevant to perturbation of the basolateral amygdala transcriptome. Molecular Psychiatry (2022).
  6. Ellis, R. J.*, Bara, A.*, Vargas, C. A.*, Frick, A. L., Loh, E., Landry, J., Uzamere, T. O., Callens, J. E., Martin, Q., Rajarajan, P., Brennand, K., Ramakrishnan, A., Shen, L., Szutorisz, H. & Hurd, Y. L. Prenatal Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol exposure in males leads to motivational disturbances related to striatal epigenetic dysregulation. Biological Psychiatry (2021).
  7. Gomez, J. L., Bonaventura, J., Keighron, J., Wright, K. M., Marable, D. L., Rodriguez, L. A., Lam, S., Carlton, M. L., Ellis, R. J., Jordan, C. J., Bi, G., Solis, O., Pignatelli, M., Bannon, M. J., Xi, Z.-X., Tanda, G. & Michaelides, M. Synaptic Zn2+ potentiates the effects of cocaine on striatal dopamine neurotransmission and behavior. Translational Psychiatry 11, 570 (2021).
  8. Ellis, R. J., Rahman, T., Sherman, J. & Hurd, Y. L. SnapShot: Neurobiology of opioid use disorder. Cell 184, 1648-1648.e1 (2021).
  9. Suprun, M., Ellis, R. J., Sampson, H. A. & Suárez-Fariñas, M. bbeaR: an R package and framework for epitope-specific antibody profiling. Bioinformatics 37, 131–133 (2021).
  10. Egervari, G., Akpoyibo, D., Rahman, T., Fullard, J. F., Callens, J. E., Landry, J. A., Ly, A., Zhou, X., Warren, N., Hauberg, M. E., Hoffman, G., Ellis, R., Ferland, J.-M. N., Miller, M. L., Keller, E., Zhang, B., Roussos, P. & Hurd, Y. L. Chromatin accessibility mapping of the striatum identifies tyrosine kinase FYN as a therapeutic target for heroin use disorder. Nature Communications 11, 1–15 (2020).
  11. Ellis, R. J., Wang, Z., Genes, N. & Ma’ayan, A. Predicting opioid dependence from electronic health records with machine learning. BioData Mining 12, 3 (2019).
  12. Michaelides, M., Miller, M. L., Egervari, G., Primeaux, S. D., Gomez, J. L., Ellis, R. J., Landry, J. A., Szutorisz, H., Hoffman, A. F., Lupica, C. R., Loos, R. J. F., Thanos, P. K., Bray, G. A., Neumaier, J. F., Zachariou, V., Wang, G.-J., Volkow, N. D. & Hurd, Y. L. Striatal Rgs4 regulates feeding and susceptibility to diet-induced obesity. Mol Psychiatry 25, 2058–2069 (2018).
  13. Ellis, R. J. & Michaelides, M. High-accuracy Decoding of Complex Visual Scenes from Neuronal Calcium Responses. bioRxiv 271296 (2018).
  14. Ellis, R. J., Michaelides, M. & Wang, G.-J. Neurodysfunction in Addiction and Overeating as Assessed by Brain Imaging. in Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery (CRC Press, 2017).
  15. Gomez, J. L., Bonaventura, J., Lesniak, W., Mathews, W. B., Sysa-Shah, P., Rodriguez, L. A., Ellis, R. J., Richie, C. T., Harvey, B. K., Dannals, R. F., Pomper, M. G., Bonci, A. & Michaelides, M. Chemogenetics revealed: DREADD occupancy and activation via converted clozapine. Science 357, 503–507 (2017).