Date: Friday, March 1, 2013
Speaker: John Quackenbush, Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Harvard
School of Public Health
Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm.
Title: The Network Effect: Integrative Systems Approaches to Modeling Biological
Processes
Abstract:
Two trends are driving innovation and discovery in biological sciences: technologies that
allow holistic surveys of genes, proteins, and metabolites, and the growing realization
that analysis and interpretation of the results requires an understanding of the complex
factors that mediate the link between genotype and phenotype. The growing body of
biological and biomedical information, driven by an exponential drop in the cost of
generating genomic data, provides an outstanding opportunity for leveraging what we
already “know” in a systematic way to understand the problems we are studying. Here, I
will provide an overview of some of the methods we are using to investigate the
complexities of human phenotypes and to explore how we can use biological data to uncover
the cellular networks and pathways that underlie human disease, building predictive models
of those networks that may help to direct therapies.
Speaker bio:
John Quackenbush received his PhD in 1990 in theoretical physics from UCLA, working on
string theory models. Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in physics, he received
a Special Emphasis Research Career Award from the National Center for Human Genome
Research to work on the Human Genome Project. He spent two years at the Salk Institute
working on developing physical maps of human chromosome 11 and two years at Stanford
University working on new laboratory and computational strategies for sequencing the human
genome. In 1997 he joined the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where
his focus began to shift to post-genomic applications with an emphasis on microarray
analysis. Using a combination of laboratory and computational approaches, Quackenbush and
his group developed analytical methods based on integration of data across domains to
derive biological meaning from high-dimensional data. In 2005, he was appointed Professor
of Biostatistics and Computational Biology and Professor of Cancer Biology at the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Professor of Computational Biology and
Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Since that time, his work has
increasingly focused on the analysis of human cancer using systems-based approaches to
understanding and modeling biological problems. In 2009 he launched the Center for Cancer
Computational Biology (CCCB) at the DFCI, which provides broad-based bioinformatics
support to the local research community using a collaborative consulting model.
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