Center for Biomedical Informatics & Genomics

 
Mission

The mission of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Genomics (CBG) is to promote research and education in biomedical informatics, computational biology, various omics, drug repurposing, and translational research of human complex diseases/traits with the goal of accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, reducing mortality and morbidity, and improving the quality of human life.

Research

The CBG faculty conducts multi-/inter-disciplinary research with the goal of accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, reducing mortality and morbidity, and improving the quality of life of Americans. One of the primary research interests includes all those areas that are related to addressing the question: What and how do genetic and environmental factors incur higher risk of, or better protection against, complex diseases, such as osteoporosis, in different sex and ethnic groups? Theoretical (e.g., methodology development in biostatistics/bioinformatics) and empirical (e.g., clinical data collection and wet/dry labs data collection/management/processing/analyses) approaches are used. We are most interested in generating, analyzing, and integrating big data of various omics in vivo in humans. The purpose is to elucidate how DNA variants affect gene expression/regulation and protein expression/modification in the form of functional networks/modules/pathways and how the knowledge gained on these molecular mechanisms in humans would translate into better prediction/intervention/precision medicine and drug development/repurposing. CBG faculty have won numerous NIH/NSF grants, including the P50 center grant and U19 program grant, and have advised/mentored more than 100 graduate students and faculty. Many of the mentees have become tenured professors winning their own grants with their own research centers/programs and some become academic and industrial administrators such as associate deans, department chairs, and vice presidents of genomics companies. Other important areas of research include big data, medical image analyses with integration to multi-omics data, and machine learning/deep learning, as applied to electronic health records and omics approaches.

Collaboration

The CBG encourages, promotes, and supports interactive and collaborative research in various fields, such as biomedical informatics (especially bioinformatics and image informatics, now expanding to health informatics), biostatistics, health informatics, computational biology, data sciences, human genetics, genomics, and proteomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, metabolomics, drug repurposing, machine learning and deep learning, and single-cell sequencing-based research.

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CCTS 2024 Awardees Gragert/Yipu

 

Current Research Areas

Future Research Directions

Service

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