The CSE Colloquium Series presents Dr. Juan Cui of the University of Georgia, who will present "From Diagnostic Biomarker Discovery to Molecular Mechanism Study: A Bioinformatics Approach to Gastric Cancer Research" on Friday, April 12 at 1:30 p.m. in 19 Avery. There will be a reception at 2:45 p.m. in 348 Avery.
Abstract
Technological advances in genomic, transcriptomic and other omic techniques have led to the rapid accumulation of large amounts of complex biological data about different human diseases. Such data has presented unprecedented opportunities as well as challenges to computational biologists to study disease like cancer from fundamentally novel perspectives, allowing them to examine cancer in a more holistic and systems view. In this presentation I will present two related works that I have carried out on cancer studies in the past few years: (i) development of a suite of novel computational techniques to predict proteins in cancer tissues that can be secreted into blood circulation and further excreted into urine; and application of these techniques to search for highly effective diagnostic markers of gastric cancer in both serum and urine; and (ii) identification of gastric cancer specific mutations through comparative analyses of next-generation sequencing data of ten gastric cancer genomes, along with in-depth analysis of the relationships of these mutations to the development of gastric cancer. I will end the presentation by highlighting a few related projects that I have carried out in the past few years.
Biography
Dr. Juan Cui is an assistant research scientist at Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department of the University of Georgia. She received her B.E. degree in information engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnic University, China and her Ph.D. degree in computational biology and bioinformatics from the National University of Singapore in 2008. She immediately joined Dr. Ying Xu’s Computational System Biology Lab (CSBL) of the UGA after graduation and was appointed as the group leader of caner informatics group within the lab, where she started her research on biomedical informatics and system biology. Her current research interests include analysis and mining of cancer genomic, proteomic and metabolomics data and utilization of such data through computational prediction and modeling to address important questions related to cancer diagnosis and mechanism studies. She has published over 30 scientific articles and two book chapters in the field of bioinformatics, computational biology, immunology and cancer. She has given 13 talks in departmental seminars and conferences/workshops. She collaborates extensively with cancer researchers in both the US and China. She has also been actively involved in professional services including serving as members of editorial boards of bioinformatics journals and program committees of international bioinformatics conferences, and has chaired two cancer informatics workshops.