Bioinformatics

BIOGRAPHY

ACADEMIC POSITION:
Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine & Cancer Institute

EDUCATION:
PhD 2003, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY
Post-doc, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
The broad objective of our research is to help cure human diseases by developing bioinformatics/computational and experimental methods to study gene functions. Recent studies link non-protein-coding RNAs to cancer and other diseases. Noncoding RNAs such as microRNAs are thought to post-transcriptionally regulate a large number of human genes. The research on non-coding RNAs is likely to provide new diagnostic and prognostic markers and eventually therapeutic targets for the treatment of human diseases. We also aim to develop methods to aid computer aided drug design efforts. Our research strategy is to apply bioinformatics/computational methods to formulate reasonable hypotheses about interesting biological problems and subsequently conduct experiments to test them. Current projects in our laboratory include but are not limited to:
1. Discovering new microRNAs
2. Identifying functions of specific disease (e.g. viruses and cancer) associated microRNAs
3. Identifying novel gene regulatory networks in cancer and other diseases
4. Developing new methods to determine protein/rna structure