Curriculum vitae
Computational biologist and biostatistician with approximately ten years of experience in neurological biomarker discovery, multi-omics analysis, quantitative translational science, and recent end-to-end statistical genomics. Work spans metabolomics, neurodegeneration, postmortem MRI, public-reference genomics, reproducible scientific software, and HPC-aware workflow engineering.
Experience
UC Irvine — Stark Lab / UCI MIND ADRC Biomarker Core
Postdoctoral Project Team Lead
Led an engineering team establishing postmortem MR imaging capability at UCI FIBRE in support of the NIH BRAIN Cell Atlas Network program. Developed human and canine postmortem imaging workflows and supported spatial co-registration across MRI, microscopy, biomarker platforms, and molecular readouts.
Sapient Bioanalytics
Postdoctoral Fellow — Computational Biology
Analyzed high-throughput mass-spectrometry metabolomics for incident prediabetes across long-term follow-up, contributing to work spanning tens of thousands of biosamples and multidisciplinary biomarker-discovery programs.
UC Irvine — Mapstone Lab
Computational Biologist / Biostatistician
Developed targeted and nontargeted metabolomics pipelines; applied mixed models, Bayesian networks, co-expression analysis, regularized regression, ROC analysis, and pathway interpretation to Alzheimer disease, Down syndrome, exercise, prediabetes, and cognitive-aging studies.
UC Irvine — Federoff Translational Laboratory and Biorepository
Computational Biologist
Analyzed plasma metabolomics in Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injury with collaborators at Oxford and Rochester; worked with neurology clinicians to prioritize phenotype-level questions and applied PLS, dimensionality reduction, NMF, and archetypal analysis.
Selected independent work / 2026
Individualized Disease-Gene Expression Landscapes
Built an executable public-reference Alzheimer genomics workflow integrating GWAS summary statistics, 1000 Genomes Phase 3, disease-gene mappings, and GTEx V8 expression, with harmonization gates, individualized allocation landscapes, compositional information geometry, calibration and leverage audits, sensitivity analyses, ablations, claim boundaries, and reproducibility receipts.
Methods & tools
Statistics / genomics. Mixed linear models; regularized regression and LASSO; grouped and nested cross-validation; multiple-testing calibration; ROC analysis; GWAS summary statistics; PRS construction and decomposition; allele harmonization; LD-clump integrity auditing; variant-to-gene mapping; compositional and Aitchison analysis; entropy and diversity metrics; Bayesian and co-expression networks; PLS; dimensionality reduction; NMF; archetypal analysis.
Computing / delivery. Python, NumPy, pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn, Matplotlib, NetworkX, PyYAML, pytest; R and major statistical genomics / omics packages; UNIX shell; Git; Make; JSON/YAML schemas; CLI and package development; reproducible releases; content hashing; provenance manifests; automated validation; 1000 Genomes; GTEx; PLINK-oriented reconciliation; LSF; Apptainer/SIF.
Education
University of California, Irvine School of Medicine
PhD, Biomedical Sciences — Neurobiology Track
Dissertation: Metabolic Systems Dyshomeostases Characterize Alzheimer's Disease: Diverse Plasma Metabolomic Evidence from LOAD, DS-AD, and ADAD.
University of Redlands
BA, Psychology — Behavioral Genetics and Biopsychology Concentration
Selected publications
- Macciardi F., Bacalini M.G., Miramontes R., et al., including Gross T.J. (2022). A retro-transposon storm marks clinical phenoconversion to late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. GeroScience.
- Martini A., Gross T.J., Head E., Mapstone M. (2022). Beyond amyloid: Immune, cerebrovascular, and metabolic contributions to Alzheimer’s disease in aging people with Down syndrome. Neuron.
- Mapstone M., Gross T.J., Macciardi F., et al. (2020). Metabolic correlates of prevalent mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease in adults with Down syndrome. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
- Gross T.J., Doran E., Cheema A., Head E., Lott I., Mapstone M. (2019). Plasma metabolites related to cellular energy metabolism are altered in adults with Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. Developmental Neurobiology.
- Fiandaca M., Gross T.J., Johnson T., et al. (2018). Potential metabolomic linkage in blood between Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injury. Metabolites.
- Gross T.J., Mapstone M., Miramontes R., et al. (2018). Toward reproducible results from targeted metabolomic studies: Perspectives for data pre-processing and a basis for analytic pipeline development. Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry.