PhD Thesis Proposal‏

Hi All,
 
I'll be defending my thesis proposal next Monday, October 20th. Everyone 
is welcome to attend!
 
Cheers,
Jiarui

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Chair: Dr. Raymond Ng
Committee: Dr. Samuel Aparicio and Dr. Will Evans
Supervisors: Dr. Sohrab Shah and Dr. Anne Condon
 
Title: Computational Integration of Heterogeneous Data to Uncover 
the Biology of Cancer
 
Abstract:
Cancer is the quintessential disease of the genome. To study its 
biology, one needs computers to `read' the genomes of cancer cells. 
Although cancer genome sequencing data are invaluable, these data alone, 
without proper processing and analyses, cannot provide insights into 
fundamental biology, not to mention help understanding complex diseases 
such as cancer. This proposal is about designing accurate, robust, and 
efficient algorithms and mathematical models to predict somatic 
mutations in cancer, and predict the mutations that drive cancer 
phenotypes. I also present efficient algorithms to integrate 
heterogeneous data to group cancer cases into a small number of 
clusters, such that tumors are broadly similar within each cluster and 
substantially different between clusters. Then therapies can be made 
tailored for each cancer cluster. Taken together, the developed 
algorithms and models will be valuable tools to distill knowledge from 
large-scale genomic datasets, advance our understanding of essential 
cancer biology, and ultimately help to improve the quality of patient lives.