[Colloquium] 2/24 Talks at TTIC: Iman Hajirasouliha, Stanford

[Mary Marre]

When:     Wednesday, February 24th at 11:00 am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Iman Hajirasouliha, Stanford


Title: Computational methods for characterizing large-scale human genome
variations with applications to cancer

Abstract:
We may be at the cusp of major leaps in personal genome and cancer genome
interpretation over the next several years, with profound impact in human
health. Large-scale projects based on Next Generation Sequencing
technologies have been sequencing thousands of individual genomes and the
technologies enabled the sequencing of many cancer genomes and multiple
tumor samples from cancer patients. In this talk, I will present some of my
major contributions during my Ph.D. and postdoctoral training for
characterizing human genomes. In particular, I will present combinatorial
algorithms for detecting various types of large-scale structural variations
in sequenced genomes, including NovelSeq, a state-of-the-art method for
detecting novel sequence insertions, Next-generation Variation Hunter, a
computational method for identifying Mobile Element Insertions (MEI), and
CommonLAW, a combinatorial framework for detecting Structural Variations in
multiple genomes.

I will also discuss applications of those methods for analyzing cancer
genomes and will present computational problems related to the evolution of
somatic mutations and intra-tumor heterogeneity. I will present novel
algorithms for reconstructing tumor lineage trees and detecting somatic
structural variations and will discuss several future directions. These
studies are considered first necessary steps for understanding tumor
genomics landscape and the challenges in biomarker development.

Bio:

Iman Hajirasouliha is a postdoctoral scholar at the Computer Science
Department, Stanford University, and a Simons Research Fellow at the
University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on computational
genomics, large-scale sequence analysis, and characterizing somatic
variations and intra-tumor heterogeneity in cancer.

Iman received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University and
his M.Sc. in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University (SFU). Prior to
moving to the bay area, he obtained his Ph.D. with Exceptional Recognition
from SFU and held a postdoctoral appointment at Brown University. During
his Ph.D., Iman was also a student collaborator at Canada's Michael Smith
Genome Sciences Centre and a visiting scholar at the Department of Genome
Sciences, University of Washington.

Iman received an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship
(CGS-D), the best paper award at ISMB-HitSeq 2011, an NSERC Postdoctoral
Fellowship and a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship. He is on the program
committee of several bioinformatics conferences, including ISMB and
RECOMB-CCB.


Host: Jinbo Xu, j3xu at ttic.edu



Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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