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Research Interests
Systems toxicology in drug and chemical regulatory and quantitative
safety assessment; analysis, experimental design, and management
of massive datasets; computational and quantitative toxicology
and pathology to identify novel agglomerative biomarkers of
exposure and toxicity; science policy with regards to dual-use
of toxicological data.
Research Projects
1) Toxicogenomic data investigation and visualization.
These projects include development of novel methods
of data analysis, experimental design, data management, mining,
and visualization. These include the use and development of
clustering technologies and visualizing these data in novel
ways. This also includes data fusion (fusion of data from disparate
data domains with regards to the same exposure) to identify
novel agglomerative biomarkers of toxicity and exposure.
2) Metabolomics. Metabolomics serves as a
new thrust area for the laboratory. I am taking the lead in
developing NMR and metabolomic skills and protocols to support
laboratory interests in this area. Future work will include
the development of rigourous statistical and machine learning
methods for the near automation of data analysis, and speeding
the time to knowledge from this technology. Data derived from
this activity will directly influence our data fusion and other
mining and visualization activities.
3) Functional regulatory element prediction and identification.
This project leverages the dbZach database to identify
regulatory elements that may predict or further explain a gene's
response to a chemical exposure. This project further drives
the mechanistic research within the laboratory, and expands
the services available to the researchers within the laboratory.
4) Computational and Quantitative Pathology. This
is a thrust area within the lab that seeks to leverage the Histopathology
Management functions within the dbZach System. The goals are
to develop a histology image bank of normal and diseased tissues
for the automated discovery of lesions. Future work in this
area will also include lesion discovery.
5) Development of the dbZach System. The dbZach
System is a data management, analysis, mining, and visualization
system for toxicology and allied data. I am the primary architect
of the system, and the lead developer. Future technologies that
will be supported include metabonomics and proteomics.
6) Development and maintenance of our toxicogenomic
information technology infrastructure. As the lead
bioinformatician for the Zacharewski Lab Bioinformatics Group
I also take the lead on procuring and maintaining our Bio-IT
infrastructure. Our greatest achievement was the procurement
of two IBM x255 eServers; one for database management, the second
for analysis.
In addition to these projects, I am also involved in the microarray
community at-large. I am a member of, and a consultant, to the
International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Heath and Environmental
Sciences Institute (HESI) Committee on Application of Genomics
to Mechanism Based Risk Assessment. I'm also a member of the
Toxicogenomics Working Group of the Microarray Gene Expression
Data Society. In the past I have lectured on microarray database
development, large-scale biological data management, and reproductive
and developmental toxicology.
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