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Director, Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Center Undergraduate: State University of New York, Buffalo (Psychology and Statistics, 1989) Dr. Wright’s group studies several areas in statistical genetics and biomedical computation, including the development of methods for mapping genetic diseases and analyzing gene expression profiles. The Wright group is particularly interested in three main areas: developing statistical methods for genetic mapping; developing new statistical methods for analyzing microarray-based gene expression data; and applying bioinformatic and computational tools to genome annotation. Several years ago, Dr. Wright began to pursue bioinformatics problems enabled by the availability of the draft human genome sequence, and was involved in some initial annotations of the draft human sequence. His group continues to work in this area, developing improved methods for hierarchical genome assembly and the computational assembly of expressed sequence tags. Dr. Wright was a member of the Family and Preventive Medicine faculty at the University of California, San Diego and was an assistant professor in the Division of Human Cancer Genetics at The Ohio State University before joining the UNC faculty in 2002. He led the creation of the Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Center in 2006 and is the center’s first director.
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Director, Laboratory of Environmental Genomics, UNC-Chapel Hill M.D.: Ukrainian State Medical University, Kiev (with honors, 1994) Dr. Rusyn’s laboratory has an active research portfolio funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. EPA. His research applies molecular, biochemical, genetic and genomics approaches to understanding the mechanisms of environmental agent-related organ injury and carcinogenesis. Through a combination of in vivo animal studies and experiments that use cellular and molecular models, he aims to better understand why certain chemicals cause cancer or organ-specific toxicity and whether humans in general, or any susceptible sub-population in particular, are at risk from similar exposures. Dr. Rusyn has more than a decade of experience in studies on health effects of environmental agents. He has been recognized with numerous awards for his research, most recently the Society of Toxicology’s 2008 Achievement Award for significant contributions to the field. Dr. Rusyn is also a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility, Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, and is the associate director of the Curriculum in Toxicology at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has served on a number of working groups convened by the National Research Council and the World Health Organization.
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Professor and Chair, Division of Medicinal Chemistry & Natural Products, UNC School of Pharmacy M.S.: Moscow State University, Moscow, USSR (Chemistry, 1982) Dr. Tropsha’s primary research interests include the development of new methodologies and software tools for computer-assisted drug design, and development of new approaches to protein 3D structure analysis and prediction based on the principles of statistical geometry. His research group focuses primarily on biomolecular informatics, which aims to understand relationships between chemical structures and their functional properties. Ongoing studies include the systematic application of statistical geometry and statistical pattern-matching techniques for comparing and classifying known 3D protein structures, as well as structure/function prediction using high-performance computational resources. Dr. Tropsha completed postdoctoral work in QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship) and drug design at Moscow State University and in computational chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill. He joined the UNC faculty in 1991 as director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products at the School of Pharmacy.
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Assistant Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science Undergraduate: Vanderbilt University (Mathematics and Computer Science, 1982) Dr. Hemminger’s research focuses broadly on how large sets of information can be organized, analyzed, retrieved and displayed. Most of the databases his team uses and develops are relevant to medical and genomic applications, but the input information can take a variety of forms such as DNA sequences, proteins, images, research articles and experimental data. In the realm of bioinformatics, Dr. Hemminger is working to develop a novel notational system for representing biological systems information and knowledge. Through the School of Information and Library Sciences, Dr. Hemminger is also applying his expertise to develop databases and a digital archive to store, search and retrieve original materials conveniently without the need for the traditional framework of publishers and review systems. In addition, his team is working on applications in biomedical informatics, biological databases, user interface design and data mining using statistical pattern recognition and feature analysis techniques to genomic and proteomic databases.
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Biostatistician, EPA-CEBC Liaison Undergraduate: Nankai University, China (English, Finance, 1995), Peking University, China (Advanced Teaching Certificate in Finance and Economics, 1999) Ms. Li served as an assistant professor at China Agricultural University for five years before coming to the United States. She worked as associate director of the Florida Center for Prevention Research for two years, where she coordinated data sharing among 10 Florida universities, and spent a year as a statistician in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida. Ms. Li joined the UNC Department of Biostatistics in 2006 and has been the Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Center’s liaison between the university and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 2007. As liaison, she is responsible for collaborating with multiple investigators to tackle statistical problems in toxicogenomics studies, and for communication between the CEBC and the EPA.
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Research Associate Professor, Division of Medicinal Chemistry & Natural Products, UNC School of Pharmacy M.S.: Latvian State University, Riga, Latvia (Physics, 1980) Dr. Golbraikh’s research focuses on the development and application of computational methods for drug discovery and design. He works with Dr. Alex Tropsha on the CEBC’s Project 2 in the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling, where he is involved in developing methods applicable to toxicity modeling. Dr. Golbraikh did postdoctoral work in molecular modeling at the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis and at Martin Luther University in Germany. He continued postdoctoral work on QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship) at Orleans University in France, then came to UNC as a postdoctoral fellow in 1999. He joined the UNC faculty in 2001. |
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Research Assistant Professor, Division of Medicinal Chemistry & Natural Products, UNC School of Pharmacy Dr. Zhu came to UNC in 2006 after four years as a postdoctoral research associate at Case Western Reserve. He works in the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling at the UNC School of Pharmacy. He is co-principal investigator of the CEBC’s Project 2. Team Member: Lin Ye, postdoctoral fellow, develops and validates QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship) models for various toxicity endpoints. |
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Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics, UNC School of Public Health Dr. Nobel collaborates with the CEBC’s Ivan Rusyn and Fred Wright on fast, computationally efficient methods for expression QTL (quantitative trait loci) analysis in inbred mouse strains and general human populations. In addition, his group is working on methods for evaluating the differential expression of gene categories and related structures in two-sample and more complicated experimental designs. Other research focuses on error-tolerant methods for, and analysis of, biclustering methods for data mining. Dr. Nobel completed postdoctoral work at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before joining the UNC faculty in 1994. Team Member: Andrey Shabalin, Ph.D. student, is working on the fast eQTL research, specifically algorithm design, programming, statistical analysis and development of graphical user interfaces.
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Assistant Professor of Statistics and Operations Research, UNC-Chapel Hill Dr. Liu joined the UNC faculty in 2004. He works on Project 2 and provides statistical machine learning methods for data analysis. Dr. Liu’s research focuses on developing statistical methodologies for general classification problems. He and his colleagues have extended recent machine-learning techniques, psi-learning and support vector machines to multicategory applications and have developed several new computational tools that have a wide range of applications, including medical imaging, tumor classification and cancer diagnosis/prognosis. Dr. Liu’s research also focuses on gene selection. Using cancer diagnosis as an example, he uses statistical methods to identify subsets of genes among thousands of candidate genes associated with specific cancers. This work will help guide future laboratory experiments in medical and pharmaceutical research toward better, more precise diagnoses, with the goal of obtaining a classification model that can yield accurate classification of cancers using a relatively small number of genes. Team Member: Xingye Qiao, graduate student in statistics, is assisting with statistical programming and computation.
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Associate Professor of Computer Science, UNC-Chapel Hill Dr. Wang joined the UNC faculty in 2002 after working for three years as a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Her role is to design and apply data mining methods that address the computational challenges identified through collaborations with scientists on Project 3. Dr. Wang’s research interests include data mining, bioinformatics and databases. Her research group designs novel data models and algorithms to address fundamental computational issues in analyzing large sets of experimental data. Ongoing research projects include: classification and clustering analysis of gene-expression profiles; discovery of discriminative structural motifs in proteins; and integrating data and knowledge from different resources and different species to develop a powerful search engine with heterogeneous biological databases. She has filed seven patents. Team Member: Xiang Zhang, Ph.D. student is developing a fast algorithm for association studies.
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Associate Professor of Biostatistics, UNC-Chapel Hill Dr. Zou joined the UNC faculty in 2001. Her role is to develop new statistical genetics and genomics methodologies for complex trait mapping, microarray expression analysis and toxicity modeling. Dr. Zou’s research interest focuses on efficient Bayesian variable selection development to map multiple (potentially interacting) disease genes and to relate chemical structures with their functional properties. In addition, her group is working on several challenging statistical problems on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), including population stratification, multiple comparisons, and bias correction for the “winner’s curse” phenomenon. Team Member: Seunggeun Lee, Ph.D. student is developing statistical methodologies and user-friendly software for GWAS data.
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