Visualizing Data

March 31, 2023

Tanner-standing-in-front-of-his-scientific-poster

Staff Spotlight: Tanner Varrelman


Tanner Varrelman discovered his knack for web development as an undergraduate in Professor Scott Nuismer’s lab. Modeling transmissible vaccines captured his interest and kept it as he pursued his master's in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and completed a lab rotation with Research and Computing Data Services (RCDS).

“I really enjoy learning new concepts to help bridge the gap by distilling complex, structured data and providing visualizations to help people get a better understanding of their data,” Varrelman says.

After he graduated, he accepted a position as a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. Since he accepted the position while COVID-19 was rapidly spreading, he became an expert at translating data from public health surveys into insight on the spread of infectious disease.

But he couldn’t stay away from the U of I for long. “For one, it’s great to be back in the Moscow area. But specifically, with this group, there’s so much to learn from everybody here and there’s such a wide variety of different projects to work on.”

By Kelsey Swenson,
IIDS Scientific Writing Intern