Winston Timp

Winston Timp is an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He earned bachelor degrees in Biochemistry, Chemistry, Physics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He then earned his a masters and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, working at the Whitehead Institute in Paul Matsudaira’s lab, focusing his thesis work on the study of cellular communication in a 3D microenvironment. After receiving his doctorate, he trained as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins in the labs of Andrew Feinberg and Andre Levchenko, studying the epigenetics of cancer.

His lab’s focus is in the development and application of sequencing technologies to gain a deeper understanding of biology and a more accurate set of clinical tools for human disease. Timp’s research integrates the principles of biophysics, molecular biology, and computational biology to create new tools for exploring the epigenome and genome of various lifeforms, ranging in size from the flu virus to hummingbirds to California redwoods. Based on the knowledge gained from these studies, Timp and his lab apply their toolsets to clinical samples for the diagnosis, surveillance and treatment of human disease. Recent projects in Timp’s lab include new sequencing methods to diagnose infectious disease, new methods to characterize RNA biology, and examining single molecule epigenetics of cancer.