Russ B. Altman

I am interested in the application of computational technologies to problems in molecular biology of relevance to medicine. In particular, my laboratory focuses on three areas. First, we are interested in building structured information repositories to support biological research. Our first effort was the RiboWEB resource for supporting studies of the bacterial ribosome. Our latest effort is in the creation of a comprehensive pharmacogenomics knowledge base that provides access to information relating genotype to phenotype (in particular, how variation in genetics leads to variation in response to drugs). Second, we are interested in the elucidation and analysis of three dimensional structures. We have projects for computing 3D molecular structures from sparse and noisy data, and for analyzing these structures to recognize and annotate active sites. We are interested in physics-based simulation of biological structures. Third, we are interested in computational methods for analyzing functional genomics information. We are focusing on the use of natural language processing techniques for extracting and summarizing information, and in the development of novel methods for analyzing microarray expression data. We are applying these technologies to the study of functional genomics.