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How a Computer Scientist Can Build Tools to Help Biologists

May 29, 2015 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm +04

The DNA sequence determines the faith of the organism. In humans, about 2 percent of the DNA sequence codes for the proteins, which are produced from the coding regions of the DNA. The other 98 percent of the DNA consists of repeats and some regions that control production of proteins. The sequence that controls gene production is called the regulatory region.

Bioinformatics and computational biology are relatively new sought-after research fields that develop computational methods used for improving our understanding of the mechanisms that control gene regulation and production of proteins. Using these fields, computer scientists make tools that help biologists to test various hypotheses using computational approaches that were previously developed in other areas of computer science such as data mining, machine learning, cloud computing, and others.

About the speaker

Farzaneh Khajouei is a second year PhD student in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is working on sequence to expression modeling of gene regulation under supervision of professor Saurabh Sinha. Her research is in the field of bioinformatics and her personal interest is in the application of information theory tools and knowledge in bioinformatics.

She was ranked 37th amongst more than 300,000 participants in the nationwide university entrance exams of Iran and she got her Bachelors of Science degree in the Electrical Engineering program at Sharif University of Technology, the most prestigious and competitive university in Iran. Afterwards, she continued her M.S. studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked on deletion and insertion coding theory. By the end, she became so interested in mathematical foundations of the information theory field that she decided to delve deeper into them and started a second masters degree in mathematics in the summer 2012. At the same time, she learned about the field of bioinformatics and how her work on the deletion and insertion coding has real-world and practical applications in this field. Consequently, she started working with Prof. Saurabh Sinha in the computer science department toward a PhD. Her thesis is about characterizing the parameter space of the models that describe a biological system.

This event is in English. No interpretation will be provided. 

Details

Date:
May 29, 2015
Time:
11:00 am - 12:30 pm +04
Event Category:

Venue

314W, PAB

Organizer

Phone
+374 60 69 40 40