Computational Problems in Systems Biology

Speaker:        Dr. Joshua W.K. Ho
                Research Fellow in Medicine
                Brigham and Women's Hospital and
                Harvard Medical School, Boston
                USA

Title:          "Computational Problems in Systems Biology"

Date:           Friday, 4 November 2011

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Systems biology is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field that
studies how interactions of various genes, proteins and other biomolecules
lead to the observed quantitative traits of a living system. A systems
biology study is characterized by generation and integrated analysis of
many genome-scale datasets. Thus, bioinformatics plays a central role in
advancing systems biology. Over the last few years, many novel
computational and software engineering problems emerged in this field. In
this talk, I describe three such problems and their solutions: (1)
reconstruction of a causal Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) from diverse
experimental data, and the application of GRN to understand inter-tissue
signaling dynamics in mammalian organ development; (2) identification of
genes with significant differential expression variability in human
diseases and ageing; and (3) development of a systematic software testing
strategy for a variety of bioinformatics programs, including those that
implement simulation, machine learning, and optimization algorithms.


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Biography:

Dr. Ho was awarded a BSc (Hon. Class 1 and University Medal) in computer
science and biochemistry in 2006 and a PhD in bioinformatics in 2010, both
from the University of Sydney, Australia. Since early 2010, he has been
working at the Harvard Medical School as an interdisciplinary postdoctoral
fellow in the Systems-based Consortium for Organ Design & Engineering
(SysCODE; http://www.SysCODE.org/). His research focuses on analysis and
integration of diverse genome-scale data to elucidate the gene regulatory
network that controls mammalian organ development. His goal is to develop
practical bioinformatics solutions to specific problems in systems biology
and medicine.