Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics

DCM&B Faculty

DCM&B Instructional Faculty

	Name	Research
	Brian D. Athey Ph.D. Professor & Chair	Brian D. Athey, Ph.D. is Professor and Inaugural Chair of the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Medical School. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and of Internal Medicine. He is the founding Principal Investigator of the NIH National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI), one of eight NIH National Biomedical Computing...
	James Cavalcoli, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	Dr. Cavalcoli has broad research experience beginning with his PhD and post-doctoral research in molecular biology and virology. He received his PhD in 1993 from LSU, Baton Rouge in Virology and did a post-doc at University of Pittsburgh. In 1996, he made a transition to bioinformatics during a second post-doc at Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor. He has 12 years of experience with development and...
	Jeffrey de Wet, Ph.D. Lecturer III	Dr. de Wet received a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. He headed a molecular biology lab at Pfizer Inc in Groton, CT that initially worked on cloning and expressing mammalian genes and later specialized in central nervous system molecular biology. In 1998, Dr. de Wet moved to the bioinformatics group at Pfizer and worked on projects to identify genes from genome...
	Barry Grant, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	Our research involves the use of computational approaches, based on both biophysics and bioinformatics, to study the structure, function and evolution of biological macromolecules. We are particularly interested in nature’s nanomachines: molecular motors and switches, which lie at the heart of biological processes, from the division and growth of cells...
	Yuanfang Guan, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	Dr. Guan’s research focuses on three aspects in bioinformatics and computational biology. These include: 1) functional genomic data mining, integration and analysis in mammalian systems; 2) experiment designs for the identification of disease candidates and gene functions are traditionally based on expert knowledge or heuristic trials; and 3) developing standard quantifications of protein...
	Ryan E. Mills, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	Our research group is primarily focused on the analysis of whole genome sequence data to identify genetic variation (primarily structural variation) and examine their potential functional impact in disease phenotypes. We are particularly interested in analyzing complex regions of the genome that are not easily resolved through modern sequencing approaches and which may exhibit interesting...
	Gilbert S Omenn, M.D., Ph.D. Professor & Director, Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics	Dr. Omenn's research focuses on cancer proteomics and informatics. He leads the Proteomics Alliance for Cancer Research, the HUPO Plasma Proteome Project, the Driving Biological Problems Core of the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics, and the Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. There are datasets for application of analytical tools, and there are research...
	Indika Rajapakse, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	My research is on the structure and function of networks that shape the dynamics of genome organization in the interphase nucleus in three dimensional space and time. I apply mathematical and statistical approaches derived from theory of networks, systems and control theory, and multivariate statistics.
	Maureen Sartor, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	Dr. Sartor’s laboratory focuses on developing methods and tools for analysis of genomic and epigenomic data. This includes Bayesian models for prioritizing peaks in ChIP-Seq data, and methods for functional enrichment testing for proteomic, metabolomics, and ChIP-Seq (regulatory and epigenomic) data. The lab’s main biological focus is cancer, concentrating on oral cancers. Research ranges...
	Yang Zhang, Ph.D. Associate Professor	Determining structure and function of protein molecules is a cornerstone of modern biology and medicine. The main focus of the Zhang lab is to develop bioinformatics approaches to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from amino acid sequences and then deduce the biological functions based on the sequence-to-structure-to-function paradigm. They are especially interested in the...

DCM&B Research Faculty

	Name	Research
	Alla Karnovsky, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor	My research interests involve the analysis of high throughout omics data, focusing primarily on metabolomics, and the development of computational methods and tools for the analysis and integration of metabolomics data with other types of genomic data. I am also interested in biomedical ontologies and one of my current projects involves the development of Informed Consent Ontology. My...
	Richard C. McEachin, Ph.D. Research Investigator	My research interests revolve around the development and application of computational approaches to understanding the genetic etiology underlying complex disease. I emphasize the use of statistical approaches that allow us to mine the extensive resources available in public databases, analysis of high-throughput data types (e.g. microarray, next generation sequencing, genome wide association...
	Rajasree Menon, Ph.D. Research Investigator	Proteomic data analyses especially in identification and characterization of known and novel alternative splice variants in cancer. Interaction network and pathway analyses of the splice variants expressed in cancer, structural comparisons between splice variants.
	Ana Rodrigues Grant, Ph.D. Research Investigator	Aging has a profound impact on human health and society, yet remains a major puzzle of biology. My research involves the development and application of new genome scale computational approaches to help understand the genetic, cellular, and molecular mechanisms of aging. My ultimate goal is to advance these methods to help ameliorate age-related diseases and preserve health. Prior to...

DCM&B Joint Faculty

	Name	Research
	Philip C. Andrews, Ph.D. Professor	Bioactive peptides--structure and function; development of new technologies in proteome analysis and functional genomics for identifying gene function and characterizing gene products, including analysis of posttranslational modifications.
	Margit Burmeister, Ph.D. Professor & Co-Director, Bioinformatics Graduate Program	This laboratory's research is aimed at finding genes involved in behavioral and neurological and psychiatric diseases, especially related to depression and drug abuse. With the Human Genome sequenced, unprecedented numbers of genetic variants identified, untangling these risk factors is now possible and has started in my laboratory. This includes work on the phenotypes, on novel techniques to...
	Daniel Forger, Ph.D. Associate Professor	My research is devoted to understanding biological clocks. I use techniques from many fields, including computer simulation, detailed mathematical modeling and mathematical analysis, to understand biological timekeeping. My research aims to generate predictions that can be experimentally verified.
	Jeff Kidd, Ph.D. Assistant Professor	We apply a genome-wide approach to understanding the processes that shape the structure, content, and sequence variation of genomes among human populations and between species. We seek to understand how biological and historic population processes act to shape genomic variation and how this variation leads to the wide range of phenotypic diversity observed in the natural world. We take...
	Matthias Kretzler, M.D. Research Professor	Systems biology of renal diseases, including nephrotic syndrome, diabetes, hypertension and autoimmune diseases of the kidney. Coordination of NIH ORDR rare disease Nephrotic Syndrome Study Network for multi scalar analysis of glomerular disease: Anaylsis of genome wide expression data sets for molecular marker identification, transcriptional pathway mapping, promoter modeling and systems...
	Jun Li, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor	Genetic and genomic analyses of complex phenotypes, including bipolar disorder, cancer, blood clotting disease, and traits involving animal models and human microbiomes. Our approach emphasizes statistical analysis of genome-scale datasets (e.g, gene expression and genotyping data, results from next-generation sequencing), evolutionary history, bioinformatics, and pattern recognition.
	Alexey Nesvizhskii, Ph.D. Associate Professor	Dr. Nesvizhskii's research interest is in the field of quantitative proteomics, with a focus on the development of computational methods for processing and extracting biological information from complex proteomic datasets. Similar to other global high throughput technologies such as microarray gene expression analysis, proteomics is extremely dependent on the ability to quickly and reliably...
	Mercedes Pascual, Ph.D. Research Professor	I am a theoretical ecologist interested in population and community dynamics. My research areas encompass: (1) The spatio-temporal dynamics of nonlinear ecological systems for antagonistic interactions (predator-prey, host-parasite, and disturbance-recovery), particularly approaches to scale-up systems from small, individual, levels to more aggregated, population, levels, and approaches to...
	Santiago Schnell, Ph.D. Research Associate Professor	Dr. Schnell investigates physiological systems comprising many interacting components, where modeling and theory may aid the identification of the key mechanisms underlying the behavior of the systems as a whole. Dr. Schnell's lab is particularly interested in investigating the molecular mechanisms of pancreatic beta-cells turnover and dysfunction in diabetes, the dynamics of metabolic...
	Elizabeth K. Speliotes, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H. Assistant Professor	Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity and related metabolic diseases.