Advisory Board and Editors Bioinformatics
Denis Larkin
Reader in Comparative Genomics at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. Interests include the evolutionary and applied genomics, chromosome research and computer sciences. Associate Editor of Animal Biotechnology.
Brittany N Lasseigne
Brittany N. Lasseigne, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology at The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. She trained in Biotechnology, Science, and Engineering at Mississippi State University (B.S.) and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (Ph.D.) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics and genomics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
Her lab develops and applies genomic- and data-driven strategies (including single-cell and long-read sequencing) to discover biological signatures that might be used to improve patient care and provide insight into the cellular and molecular processes contributing to disease, especially for diseases impacting the brain and/or kidney. Their recent work includes prioritizing drug repurposing candidates for cancers and polycystic kidney disease, evaluating preclinical models and cross-species transcriptomic signatures to improve disease modeling, and applying single-cell and long-read technologies to neurological disease tissues to understand the role that context plays in disease etiology, progression, and treatment.
The Lasseigne Lab is currently focused on integrating genomics data, functional annotations, and patient information with machine learning and regulatory network approaches across diseases that impact the brain or kidney to discover novel mechanisms in disease etiology and progression, identify genome-driven therapeutic targets and opportunities for drug repositioning and repurposing, determine clinically-relevant biomarkers, and understand how cellular context contributes to these diseases. Collectively, these distinct projects all apply genetics and genomics to human diseases and build tools to accelerate future research. Their lab also develops data science software and analytical pipelines that are open-source, well-documented, and hosted by third-party code distributors, critical for facilitating reproducibility and enabling the research community to use the methods they develop.
Timo Lassmann
Head of computational biology and the genetics and rare disease program at the Telethon Kids Institute. Interested in sequence analysis, large scale data integration and medical genomics. Past: RIKEN, Karolinska Institute, King's College London.
Gerard R. Lazo
Geneticist with the Crop Improvement and Genetics Research Unit, Agricultural Research Service, Western Regional Research Center, Albany, CA, USA.
Tong Geon Lee
Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics, Corn, Tomato, Soybean, Wheat-Rye Translocation
Elliot J Lefkowitz
Professor of Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB); Director of Informatics for the UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science; Data Secretary of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and Editor-In-Chief of the ICTV Online (10th) Report on Virus Taxonomy. My research focuses on contributing to the understanding of microbial (especially viral) genomics and evolution by developing and utilizing computational tools and bioinformatics techniques to mine sequence and other data for significant patterns characteristic of function and/or evolution.
Tim P Levine
Tim Levine trained first as a medic then moved into membrane cell biology, and then into intracellular lipid traffic. He showed that inter-organellar contacts are important sites for non-vesicular traffic inside cells. This was part of a revolution in our understanding of intracellular organelles. For over 40 years previously membrane contact sites had been largely ignored or dismissed as artefacts. Tim initially found a lipid transfer protein that localised to a contact site, and showed that it bound to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) protein VAP via a motif he named the FFAT motif. FFAT motifs are present in several other lipid transfer proteins leading Tim to propose that FFAT-motif proteins would act at contact sites by binding simultaneously to both the ER and another membrane. By improving the definition of FFAT-like motifs, Tim showed they are present in numerous other proteins, facilitating molecular research of many contact site components. Tim organised the first two conferences on contact sites in 2005 and 2011, linking advances in lipid traffic to those in calcium traffic to bring together these overlapping sub-disciplines.
Tim has also used remote homology tools to identify a new family of lipid transfer proteins anchored at contact sites, and highlighted the power of these tools through specific examples and a ‘How-To’ guide.
Xing Li
Dr. Xing Li is an Assistant Professor and Associate Consultant in the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Department of Health Science Research at Mayo Clinic - voted the best hospital by U.S. News & World Report. Dr. Li completed his PhD in Bioinformatics from The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Dr. Li also holds a Masters Degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Bachelors Degree in Microbiology. Dr. Li’s research interests focus on machine learning, bioinformatics, and statistical data mining in large scale data in biomedical research, such as next generation sequencing data (whole genome sequencing, RNA-seq, microarray data), in the file. He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers in reputable journals and book chapters in the fields of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, cancer research, cardiovascular disease, embryonic stem cell (ESC) and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research, and human genomics, genetics and development, and Microbiology. Dr. Li’s publications have been highlighted as Journal Cover Stories, Journal Featured Articles, Highlights Section Papers, Must Read by Faculty 1000, and ESC & iPSC News, etc. Dr. Li has been developing data analysis tools, such as RCircle and PCA3d, etc. Dr. Li is also a member of American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), American Statistics Association (ASA) and American Heart Association (AHA).
Jingyi Jessica Li
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Department of Human Genetics at University of California, Los Angeles. I am also a faculty member in the Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program in Bioinformatics and a member in the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) Gene Regulation Research Program Area. Prior to joining UCLA, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the Interdepartmental Group in Biostatistics at University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Profs Peter J. Bickel and Haiyan Huang. I received my B.S. (summa cum laude) from Department of Biological Sciences and Technology at Tsinghua University, China in 2007.
Jiaqi Liang
Dr. Jiaqi Liang is a Researcher in the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University. Her research predominantly focuses on the clinical and molecular research of lung cancer.
Chun Liang
Professor in Bioinformatics, Biology Department, Miami University, Ohio, USA
Carl P. Lipo
A Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Binghamton University in New York.