Invited Speaker: Liang Han

Biography

Dr. Liang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also an Assistant Professor of Baylor College of Medicine and a regular faculty member of the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. He received Ph.D. training from the Quantitative and Computational Biology program at Princeton University, which provides graduate education in the interface of biology, the physical sciences, and computational science. His PhD thesis (advisor, Dr. Laura Landweber) is about RNA informatics on translation termination and alternative splicing. As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Liang completed three years of research on computational and evolutionary genomics with Dr. Wen-Hsiung Li at the University of Chicago, where his research was about microRNA regulation and gene duplication. Currently, Dr. Liang's research interests include the analysis of next-generation sequencing data, integrative analysis of cancer genomics data, non-coding RNA regulation, and network biology. More information is available at http://odin.mdacc.tmc.edu/~hliang1/.

Abstract
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has become a powerful approach for biomedical research. In particular, RNA-seq and exome-seq are two major NGS applications with wide interest: one focuses on gene expression quantification; and the other is mainly for somatic mutation identification. In this talk, I will discuss my recent two projects: whole-transcriptome analysis in gastric cancer and exome-seq analysis in endometrial cancer. Through integrating functional genomic data, I will present computational approaches for effective target identification.