Research Group Overview

Our laboratories are active with the work of undergraduate and graduate students, medical students, post doctoral fellows and staff who work collaboratively with many other groups.  The group and its research are inherently multidisciplinary, with research focusing on two areas:

•     applied computational biology and bioinformatics - text mining and hypothesis generation
•     genetics, genomics and proteomics research that works in tandem with our software findings and instrumentation capabilities, especially to improve human health, quality-of-life and security.

We pursue independent research, work collaboratively with other faculty across Virginia Tech and researchers off-campus using the software and instrumentation being developed in our laboratory.  The group attempts to make the results of our research available to the world to accelerate biomedical discovery and application via commercialization, having founded Light Biology (which became Nimblegen, now Roche), BioAutomation, and Heliotext. Additional information and our on-line computational resources can be found at http://innovation.vbi.vt.edu/.

The currently active projects include:

• Genomic analysis software and laboratory validation for gene discovery (polymorphism prediction, genomics features extraction/correlation)
• Expression and proteomics software (structure/function/variation correlation and structural databases)
• Data mining (grammar induction) on terabyte-sized biomedical text datasets
• Duplicate article detection as a component to the study of publication ethics as presented on the Déjà Vu web site
• Computational modeling and experimental verification of quantitative traits in association with repeat polymorphisms in canines and humans
• The development of new approaches to clinical decision making and support.

Leader: Harold Garner