Keynote Lecture

On Computational Approaches to Gene Regulation Dr. Jun Liu Director and Professor of Harvard Statistical and Computational Genomics Laboratory Professor of Broad Institute of MIT-Harvard Cambridge, Massachusetts USA Date: June 25, 2007 Time: 1:20 - 2:20 PM Location: Ballroom 5

Abstract

Understanding how genes are regulated in various circumstances (e.g., heatshock, starvation, etc.) is a central problem in molecular biology. The adoption of large-scale biological data generation techniques such as the mRNA microarrays has enabled researchers to tackle the gene regulation problem in a global way. I will survey some computational and statistical strategies developed by our group on how to effectively use the gene upstream sequence information in junction with mRNA expression microarray data to dissect the gene regulatory network. I will describe in detail a study of RacA binding activities in Bacillus Subtilis, explaining how statistical approaches helped the biologists discover RacA's binding sites. I will describe a new dimension reduction technique that has been applied successfully to our gene regulation studies and show a cute theorem supporting the technique.

Biography

Dr. Jun Liu is the Director and Professor Jun Liu of Harvard Statistical and Computational Genomics Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago, USA and BS degree from Peking University, Beijing, China,. He is currently Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Science, with a courtesy Professor appointment at Harvard Biostatistics Department, Harvard School of Public Health and Broad Institute of MIT-Harvard. Before that, he held Assistant, Associate, and full professor positions at Stanford University from 1994 to 2003 and was a Visiting Fellow of NIH. Dr. Liu was the recipient of the 2002 COPSS Presidents' Award (given annually by five leading statistical associations to one individual under age 40), the recipient of the Mitchell Prize from the International Society of Bayesian Analysis in 2000, and one of the recipients of the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 1995. He was selected as a Terman Fellow by Stanford University in 1995, as a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) in 2002, and as a Bernoulli Lecturer by the International Bernoulli Society in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Liu has served on numerous editorial boards of leading statistical and computational journals and has been frequently on the grant review panels of the NSF and the NIH. Dr. Liu is well known internationally for his seminal theoretical and methodological research work in both Markov chain and sequential Monte Carlo methods. Dr. Liu is highly regarded as a pioneer in statistical genomics and computational biology.