The HPCBio Team

Jenny Drnevich is the Assistant Director of HPCBio. Her areas of expertise are statistical analyses of gene expression data from microarrays and RNA-Seq, post-analysis data mining and bioinformatics instruction.
Jenny received a B.S. in 1996 from Purdue University in Ecology, Evolution and Population Biology and then a Ph.D. in 2001 from Arizona State University studying Evolution and Behavioral Ecology in insects. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, she did field work in Australia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama and Thailand, and also spent a semester at the University of Sheffield, England. Jenny then switched her research focus to quantitative genetics and genomics, moving to the University of Illinois in 2001 to do post-doctoral work studying mating success and longevity in Drosophila melanogaster. She started her first microarray experiment in 2002 and was the first user of the Affymetrix microarray system at the Carver Biotechnology Center at the University of Illinois.
In 2005 she joined the Carver Biotechnology Center's Bioinformatics Unit as a Bioinformatics Specialist to provide microarray analysis services to researchers at the University and elsewhere. In 2012, the Bioinformatics Unit joined with groups from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to form the HPCBio group, and her services expanded to include other sequencing data, particularly RNA-Seq. To date, she has analyzed over 400 expression experiments from 120+ research groups across the world. She also has taught or co-taught over 65 of different workshops for undergraduates, graduates, postdoc and faculty members covering gene expression analysis, metagenomics analysis, basic R programming, data management, Linux and using large computer clusters, reaching over 2000 participants from within and outside the University of Illinois.