Please join us for an NCCC and Biomedical Data Science Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology Faculty Candidate Seminar with                                                          Siming Zhao, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chicago on Wednesday, February 12 at 11:00 a.m., Auditorium H, DHMC. 

Talk title: “Power Is In The Details: Novel Statistical Methods For Studying Selection In Cancer”

Hosted by: Brock Christensen, Ph.D.

Light refreshments will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. 

Talk Summary 

Cancer is caused by somatic mutations that confer a selective advantage to cells. Identification of genes under positive selection (driver genes) from somatic mutation data and understanding their roles during tumorigenesis are central tasks in cancer biology. Existing methods for studying selection either lack explicit statistical models, or rely on very simple models that do not capture complex features in somatic mutations of driver genes. In this talk, I will present a powerful method we developed called driverMAPS for driver gene identification.  Our method is the first statistical framework that models the rich pattern of positive selection in cancer. Then to further understand how selection in specific driver genes depends on the tumor’s context, such as existence of somatic mutations in related driver genes or tumor microenvironment, I will present our new statistical method called diffDriver and its applications. In my future work, I am interested in developing and applying computational methods to understand the roles of genetic variations, including both somatic and germline variations, in leading to cancer.

Biography

Dr. Siming Zhao received her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. She obtained her Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University under the supervision of Dr. Richard Lifton. At Yale, she led several cancer-sequencing projects and characterized the genetic landscape of cancers. After that, Dr. Zhao moved to University of Chicago for her postdoc studies, co-advised by Drs. Matthew Stephens and Xin He. There, she developed computational methods to study the genetics of cancer and other complex diseases. She is interested in the roles of genetic variations in cancer and computational methods to translate large-scale genomic data to disease mechanisms.

Please also mark your calendar for upcoming NCCC/BMDS Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology faculty candidate seminars at DHMC: 

Dr. Yijun Sun - Thurs., 2/27: Aud. H @ 11:00am

Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology 

Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences 

University at Buffalo

Dr. Yury Pritykin - Thurs., 3/12: Aud. H @ 11:00am

Research Associate, Computational and Systems Biology Program 

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center