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Fred Wright, Ph.D.

Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center
Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Biological Sciences

306 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566
  • 919-515-9060

David McK. Bird, Ph.D.

Associate Director of Research
Co-Director of Genomic Sciences Graduate Program (Functional Genomics)
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Plant Pathology

326 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7253

Alison Motsinger-Reif, Ph.D.

Associate Director of Consulting and Computing
Associate Professor of Statistics

347 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

Dr. Alison Motsinger-Reif is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics. Her primary research interest is the development and application of methods to understand the genetic, proteomic, and metabolomic predictors of phenotypes such as drug response and common, complex disease. She works on a variety of applications in pharmacogenomics, including performing association mapping in clinical trials and a cytotoxicity cell line model. The methods development is focused on detecting complex models, including gene-gene and gene-environment interactions using combinatoric approaches and evolutionary computation algorithms.

Spencer V. Muse, Ph.D.

Co-Director of Genomic Sciences Graduate Program (Bioinformatics)
Professor of Statistics

303 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

Dr. Spencer V. Muse is a Professor of Statistics, who at the time the founding of the center, was an Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Statistics in 2003 and to Professor of Statistics in 2009. Dr. Muse develops statistical methods and software tools for the analysis of DNA sequence data, with emphasis on simultaneous analysis of multiple gene sequences from multiple species using a comparative genomics approach. He teaches ST305, an introductory class for majors, regularly.

Yihui Zhou, Ph.D.

Associate Director of Outreach
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

324 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566
  • 919-515-8966

Hamid Ashrafi, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Horticultural Science

234 Kilgore Hall
Campus Box 7609
  • 919-515-1216

David L. Aylor, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Thomas Hall 3570 A
Campus Box 7614
  • 919-515-7079

Ben Callahan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Population, Health, & Pathobiology

CVM Research Building 158
Campus Box 8401

Dr. Callahan studies microbiomes - the complex microbial communities which inhabit and interact with almost every part of the world around us. He has developed new bioinformatic methods to more accurately characterize microbial communities, and applied them to the study of the microbial contribution to the pathophysiology of preterm birth. He is also interested in adaptation within microbial populations, which he has studied with a mix of analytics, simulation and experimental evolution.

Gavin Conant, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

357A Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7614

Our primary research interest is in understanding the origins of novel features in evolution and ecosystems, in particular how new genetic features appear and are altered by natural selection. One of our major area of interest is in how gene and genome duplications alter cellular networks and hence phenotypes. We also used metagenomic techniques to study how microbial communities can create complex ecosystems through simple assembly rules.

Denis Fourches, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

322 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

Fourches' research goal is to analyze, model, and forecast complex interactions between chemical structures and various types of biological targets to design novel compounds with the desired activity and safety profiles. To achieve this objective, he focuses on the development of cheminformatics techniques that characterize the two- and three-dimensional properties of molecules, establish quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR), and screen extremely large libraries of virtual compounds to prioritize hits to be tested experimentally. Fourches’ research has important applications to drug discovery, agrochemical development, green chemistry, and biocompatible nanomaterials.

Steffen Heber, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Computer Science-Engineering

325 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566
  • 919-513-2726

Dahlia Nielsen, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Genetics

358 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

David Rasmussen

Assistant Professor of Entomology & Plant Pathology

312 Ricks Hall & Partners II, Room 1418
Campus Box 7566

Dr. Rasmussen is an infectious disease biologist and developer of phylogenetic methods for tracking the spread of pathogens using genomic sequence data. His research focuses on several human pathogens including dengue, influenza and HIV, as well as agricultural pathogens of plants and animals. Future work in his group will couple experimental viral evolution studies with phylogenetic analyses to better understand the genetic basis of pathogen emergence and adaption to new hosts.

David Reif, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Genetics

356 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

David M. Reif joined North Carolina State University in 2013 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and a resident member of the Bioinformatics Research Center. His overarching research goal is to understand the complex interactions between human health and the environment through the integrated analysis of high-dimensional data from diverse sources, including epidemiological studies of human health, high-throughput screening (HTS) of environmental chemicals, and model organism data. To accomplish this goal, he focuses on analytical/visual methods development, experimental design, and software implementation. Prior to joining NCSU, David was a Principal Investigator (PI) with the U.S. EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology, where he led several statistical/bioinformatical efforts at the Agency and collaborated on a variety of projects with federal, academic, and industry partners.

Xinxia Peng, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Molecular Biomedical Sciences

312 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

The Peng Lab uses systems approaches to better understand pathogen-host-microbiome interactions and microbial pathogenesis. The goal is to uncover underlying molecular mechanisms of microbial pathogenesis and to identify targets of intervention as well as biomarkers for clinical applications. We focus on computational analysis of high-throughput omics data combined with experimental validation. The Lab is housed in the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) Research Building located at the NC State Biomedical Centennial Campus, and is part of NC State Bioinformatics Research Center.

Jeff Thorne, Ph.D.

Professor of Genetics and Statistics

323 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

Dr. Thorne regularly teaches Bioinformatics II (ST590C), a core course in the Bioinformatics graduate curriculum. His research focus is evolutionary inference from interspecific data and the reconciliation of such inference techniques with population genetics; developing statistical tools for studying molecular evolution using DNA and protein sequences; protein structure and protein evolution; and using molecular and fossil data to estimate the times since different species had common ancestors.

Jung-Ying Tzeng, Ph.D.

Professor of Statistics

305 Ricks Hall
Campus Box 7566

Dr. Jung-Ying Tzeng teachs Genetic Data Analysis, a special topics course for bioinformatics and statistical genetics students that covers the basics of genetic data analysis and gene mapping. Her research focus is development of statistical methods that can facilitate genetic epidemiologic research on human complex diseases; statistical modeling of multimarker/haplotype association for genome-wide and candidate-gene studies; gene-based and pathway-based analysis for pharmacogenetics; SNP genotyping error and quality control; and sequence-based association studies.