Organizer: Sunil Mathur, University of Mississippi

Youping Deng, Ph. D. is Assistant Professor of Department of Biological at The University of Southern Mississippi and Associate Director of Bioinformatics Facility of Mississippi Functional Genomics Network. Youping Deng received his B.A. and M.S. from Central China Normal University and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Peking Union Medical College. His main research interests are bioinformatics, computational biology, functional genomics, diabetes and cancer. His current and future research is focused on developing and applying computational tools for high throughput data analysis, comparative genomics, designing biology databases, and studying new targeting molecules and their cellular signal transduction pathways for fighting cancer and diabetes.

Dawn E. Wilkins, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Mississippi.  Dr. Wilkins holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois-Springfield.  Her primary areas of research interest include computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning, gene expression data analysis, artificial intelligence, computational learning theory, data mining, and database systems. 

Susmita Datta, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Department of Bioinformaics and Biostatistics, School of Public Health and Information Sciences at University of Louisville. Dr. Datta holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Georgia and a Postdoctoral training from Emory University. Her research interests include Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Statistical issues in Population Biology, Statistical Genetics, Infectious Disease Modeling and Survival Analysis. She has been working on the problems of modeling gene expression profiles through partial least squares regression, validation of clustering algorithms for grouping genes and detection of  differential gene expression. She is currently involved with time course microarray data analysis and gene network problems. She is associated with the Proteomic Center at the University of Louisville. Her current research in proteomics includes feature selection, clustering/classification and identification of biomarkers. She is involved in collaborative research with interdisciplinary scientists from Biochemistry, Biology, Public Health and Computer scientists.

Olusegun George is a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Memphis. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Rochester. His research interests include bioinformatics, biostatistics, analysis of correlated discrete data, distribution theory, statistical risk assessment and meta-analysis. He has published in Biometrika, Statistics in Medicine, Sanhkya, Biometrics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Mutant Research, Clinical Cancer Research and similar biomedical journals. His current research interests in bioinformatics include designing meta-analytic procedures for pooling microarray data from different independent studies that use different microarray platforms. Typically these databases will contain related information such as gene annotations, gene ontology information, protein-protein interaction. Dr. George is currently in charge of the Bioinformatics Program at the University of Memphis.

Cheng Cheng, Ph.D., is an Associate Member in the Department of Biostatistics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He was an Assistant Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University, and received his post-doctoral training in the Upjohn Laboratories. Dr. Cheng holds a Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University, and an M.S. degree from the University of Texas at El Paso. His primary areas of scientific expertise include statistical data analyses and study designs in biomedical research, raging from basic science to clinical trials. His recent research interests include the development and application of statistical inference procedures for analyzing microarray gene expression and SNP experiments, and general nonparametric statistical methods for high-dimensional data.

Bahram Alidaee received the B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, Iran, the M.B.A. degree from the University of North Texas and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, 1988.  He is currently an associate professor of operations management and the Interim Director for the Hearin Center for Enterprise Science at the School of Business Administration, the University of Mississippi.  His research interests include heuristic programming, complex systems, game theory and cost allocations.  He has published in journals such as Management Science, Transportation Science, Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research Society, Ieee Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Operations Research Letter, Information Processing Letters, Applied Mathematics Letters, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, and other journals.  He is member of INFORMS, DSI, POMS, and APICS. 

Lily Wang, PhD, is an Assistant professor in Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University. Dr Wang holds a PhD degree in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her thesis (under the direction of Dr P.K. Sen) focused on developing statistical methods for the approximation of protein sequence alignment scores distribution from database searching in bioinformatics. She is primarily interested in developing statistical methods for comparing protein sequences and analyzing gene expression data.

Edward J. Perkins, Ph.D., is a Research Biologist and team leader of the Environmental Genomics and Genetics Team, Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg MS.  Dr  Perkins holds a Ph.D. degree from Washington State University, and a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois. His primary areas of scientific expertise include molecular biology, environmental toxicology, genomics, and biotechnology. His recent interests include the application and development of genomic and bioinformatics methods to elucidate the mechanisms by which energetic compounds cause neurotoxicity in invertebrates and vertebrates.

Dr. Sunil Mathur is an Assistant Professor, and Administrator of Statistical Computing Center, Department of Mathematics, University of Mississippi. He received his Ph.D. (Statistics), M.Phil (Statistics), M.Sc (Statistics) and B.Sc (Mathematics) degrees from the University of Delhi, India. His research interests include bioinformatics, nonparametric statistics, biostatistics, and computational statistics. His current research interests are development of statistical tests for the identification of significant gene expressions, noise reduction methods, methods for normalization of microarray data, time-lagged models, and ratio-based methods. He is an associate editor of two leading international journals in statistics.