Elena Rivas

Elena Rivas is a Lecturer in the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on developing computational methods for RNA structure prediction and identifying new RNA functions. She also works on computational screens to identify evolutionarily conserved RNA structures across organisms. Her work involves testing computational results through collaboration with other groups. A key area of interest is distinguishing functional RNAs from transcriptional noise and artifacts, particularly in the context of long noncoding RNAs. She integrates phylogenetic methods into homology search and alignment techniques to improve RNA function identification. Her research emphasizes probabilistic models and statistical inference to design reliable algorithms for biological sequence analysis.

Elena Rivas is a molecular and cellular biologist specializing in computational biology, genomics, evolutionary biology, and structural RNAs. Her research focuses on the identification and analysis of non-coding RNA families, RNA structure prediction, and the evolutionary conservation of RNA sequences and structures. She has contributed significantly to the development of tools like Rfam and RNAcentral, which are essential for non-coding RNA research. Her work includes the creation of dynamic programming algorithms for RNA structure prediction and the exploration of probabilistic models for RNA secondary structure prediction. Rivas also investigates the role of small non-coding RNAs in bacterial genomics and their evolutionary dynamics.