Program Faculty

My current research interests are in translational medicine, Viral evolution, Population Genetics, Yeast Genetics and Ribosome Biology. I have joint appointments in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and the Department of Physics at Rutgers University. I am also a Member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) where I work closely with several physicians and researchers, in particular with Dr. Ganesan (oncologist) and Hossein Khiabanian (Systems Biology). Trained as a physicist, I have been working on a variety of problems in Biology since 2001. As a result of my work at Thinking Machines Corporation and IBM Research, I have extensive experience with computational methods, including the analysis of large datasets, statistical inference methods, parallel programming algorithms, model building and pattern recognition. The overall research focus is to use modeling, simulations, computation and analytical reasoning to understand biological phenomena using genomic and phenotypic data. My students and I are working on several projects in cancer bioinformatics, viral evolution, yeast genetics and ribosome biology. We are also developing techniques to identify signatures of disease risk, drug efficacy and selection in gene expression, SNP and sequence data using large public databases such as TCGA, MitoMap, HapMaP, 1000 Genomes Project etc.

Publications