Posts classified under: Fall 2022

Leveraging Molecular and Clinical Data to Improve Women’s Health in the Era of Precision Medicine

BIODS 260
12/1/22
1:30 pm-2:30 pm
MSOB x303
Marina Sirota, PhD Associate Professor
Associate Director of Advocacy and Outreach Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI) University of California, San Francisco

TITLE:

Leveraging Molecular and Clinical Data to Improve Women’s Health in the Era of Precision Medicine

ABSTRACT:

Each year, 15 million babies (representing 10% of the world’s births) are born preterm, defined as before the 37th week of gestation. Survival for most children born preterm has improved considerably, but surviving children remain at increased risk for a variety of serious complications, many of which contribute to lifelong challenges for individuals and their families, as well as to burdensome economic costs to society. The exact mechanism of spontaneous preterm birth is unknown, though a variety of social, environmental, and maternal factors have been implicated in its cause. We are in particular interested in applying computational integrative methods to investigate the role of the immune system in pregnancy (Cell Press Sneak Peak 2021) and elucidating genetic (Sci Rep 2018), transcriptomic (Front Immunol 2018), microbiome (Front Microbio 2020), environmental (Environ Health 2018), and clinical determinants of preterm birth. Moreover, through the March of Dimes (MOD) Database for Preterm Birth Research, we are leading efforts to organize scientific data and research across all MOD- funded Prematurity Research Centers with the goal of enhancing research collaboration and coordination to accelerate the overall pace of discovery in this field (Sci Data 2018). This work is funded by the National Library of Medicine at NIH, March of Dimes and The Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

SUGGESTED READING:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91625-1

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-022-02522-x

WEBSITE: http://sirotalab.ucsf.edu

Zoom link: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/92874055477pwd=aThzNmpmNEQ1L2Fj V0E5ZXF5SDR1UT09&from=addon
Password: 705300

PDF Flier

Fireside chat with Lior Pachter, moderated by Barbara Engelhardt

BIOMEDICAL DATA SCIENCE PRESENTS:
BIODS 260
12/08/22 1:30PM-2:50PM
MSOB X303

Lior Pachter Fireside chat

Moderated by Barbara Engelhardt

Lior Pachter was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa where he attended Pretoria Boys High School. After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech in 1994, He left for MIT where he was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics in 1999. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he was a postdoctoral researcher (1999-2001), assistant professor (2001-2005), associate professor (2005-2009), and until 2018 the Raymond and Beverly Sackler professor of computational biology and professor of mathematics and molecular and cellular biology with a joint appointment in computer science. Since January 2017 he has been the Bren professor of computational biology at Caltech.

His research interests span the mathematical and biological sciences, and he has authored over 100 research articles in the areas of algorithms, combinatorics, comparative genomics, algebraic statistics, molecular biology and evolution. He has taught a wide range of courses in mathematics, computational biology and genomics. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology and has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Miller Professorship, and a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for the successful technology transfer of widely used sequence alignment software developed in his group