Core Faculty
The Institute for Genomics & Systems Biology (IGSB) will house 10 core faculty members in genomics and computational biology at the University of Chicago and several scientists at Argonne National Laboratory. Three Core Faculty have already been recruited since the Institute was established in July 2006. Each IGSB Faculty has a primary appointment in a University of Chicago Department and membership in IGSB as a Core Faculty. This facilitates collaboration in a rich mix of scientific areas and offers partnering departments the opportunity to build their genomics and systems biology expertise.
Michael Rust
Dr. Rust will join the IGSB in Jaunary 2011. The Rust lab is interested in elucidating how information processing and decision-making functions in a live cell arise robustly from the stochastic interactions of individual molecules, and how these systems malfunction in diseased states. To this end, we employ quantitative fluorescence microscopy and biochemical measurements closely coupled with data-driven mathematical modeling. We have recently been interested in a three-protein clock found in photosynthetic bacteria. The post-translational interactions between these proteins (KaiA, KaiB and KaiC) generate a self-sustained 24 hour oscillation capable of predicting the time of day based on previous environmental cues.
Kevin White
Dr. White is a pioneer in combining experimental and computational techniques to understand the networks of factors that control biological systems during development and evolution. He has developed novel integrated systems biology approaches for studying complex diseases and identifying new diagnostic biomarkers for a variety of cancer types.
Andrey Rzhetsky
Dr. Rzhetsky’s interest is in (asymptotic) understanding how phenotypes, such as human healthy diversity and maladies, are implemented at the level of genes and networks of interacting molecules. To harvest as much information about known molecular interactions as possible, his group runs a large-scale text-mining effort aiming at analysis of a vast corpus of biomedical publications. Currently they can extract from text automatically about 500 distinct flavors of relations among biomedical entities (such as bind, activate, merystilate, and transport)
Richard Jones
Dr. Jones was jointly appointed Assistant Professor of the IGSB and the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research in September 2006. As a postdoc at Harvard, Jones pioneered the use of protein microarrays to study complex molecular signaling networks involved in human cancers and other diseases. His new IGSB laboratory utilizes advanced proteomics and genomics technologies to better understand the complex signal transduction mechanisms that result in cancer, diabetes, and other human disease. An understanding of these processes at the molecular level should enable the identification of many new therapeutic targets
Dionysios Antonopoulos
Dr. Antonopoulos joined the IGSB and Biosciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory in June 2008 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine, Section of Gastroenterology, at the University of Chicago. His present research is focused on soil metagenomics using next-generation DNA sequencing technologies, as well as applying the same analytical tools to understanding a variety of diseases of the GI tract. He works closely with members of the High-Throughput Genome Analysis Core as well as the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne..
Folker Meyer
Dr. Meyer is a computational biologist with research interest in metagenomics. He currently has joint appointment with the Mathematics and Computer Science Divison, and the Computation Institute. He is working closely with researchers in the Biosciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the medical school at the University of Chicago. Dr. Meyer is the IGSB Associate Director who is responsible on the administrative unit at ANL
