Prediction of Functional Modules in Microbes and Their Regulatory Networks

Dr. Ying Xu
Chair Professor
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department
University of Georgia

Room 610, CBI, New Life Science Building, PKU
2:00-3:30 PM, Tuesday, 19 July,2005

Bios:
Ying Xu is a chair professor of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, and the director of the Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia (UGA). Before joining UGA in Sept 2003, he was a senior staff scientist and group leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he still holds a joint position. He also holds guest or research professor positions at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Jilin Uiniversity and Zhejiang University of China. He received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991. His Ph.D. thesis work was on development of efficient algorithms for matroid intersection problems. Between 1991 and 1993, he was a visiting assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines. He started his bioinformatics career in 1993 when he joined Ed Uberbacher's group at ORNL to work on the GRAIL project. Since then, he has been working in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology. His current research interests include (a) computational inference and modeling of biological pathways and networks, (b) protein structure prediction and modeling, (c) large-scale biological data mining, and (d) cancer bioinformatics. He is interested in both development of bioinformatics tools and study of biological problems using in silico approaches. He has over 100 publications in the open literature, including two books in bioinformatics ("Current Topics in Computational Molecular Biology", MIT Press, 2002) and genomics ("Microbial Functional Genomics", John Wiley and Sons, March 2004). He has also given over 100 invited/contributed talks at conferences, workshops, research organizations and universities. He has (co)developed a number of bioinformatics software, including GRAIL II, GRAIL EXP, PROSPECT, CUBIC and EXCAVATOR. He enjoys teaching and interacting with students. He (co)taught a number of bioinformatics courses at both UGA and ORNL-UTK. Over the years, he has been actively involved in bioinformatics conferences and journals. In 2004-2005, he is the Program Committee (co) Chair of the IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (CSB'05). He currently serves on the editorial boards of four international journals. He has also served on review panels/study sections for major funding agencies such as NSF, NIH and DOE.