smgroves@virginia.edu

I’m an assistant professor in the School of Data Science at UVA, where I study cancer systems biology and biological networks. I’m a physicist by training and a network scientist by practice: I model high-dimensional biological data to understand how cells change state, from cell plasticity in small cell lung cancer to the physics of chromosome segregation during mitosis.

I also care a lot about science communication and teaching. I make educational videos with motion design, study how AI is changing engineering education, and teach Communicating with Data (DS 2003).

Background: B.S. in Physics & Mathematics, William & Mary (2016) · PhD in Chemical and Physical Biology, Vanderbilt (2022), in the Quaranta lab · Postdoc at UVA’s SASCO center.

Interested in working together? See my projects or email me.

news

Sep 28, 2026	A collaborative paper I worked on with the Sage lab, Transcriptional networks underlying tumour plasticity in small-cell lung cancer is officially preprinted! Take a look for more info about the second generation of BooleaBayes, BoBa-T, which uses single cell ATAC-seq and RNA-seq to build, simulate, and perturb transcription factor networks.
Aug 4, 2026	Our paper, YAP1 defines an emergent, plastic population of relapsed small cell lung cancer, is officially online.
Jul 17, 2026	My paper with the Janes lab, “Cell-specific Cahn-Hilliard models predict condensed fates of the chromosomal passenger complex,” was accepted at PLOS Computational Biology!

Email is the best way to contact me.