Bioinformatics is a rapidly growing area of molecular biology that addresses the use of computers for the acquisition, management, and analysis of biological information. The explosion of interest in bioinformatics in the past few years has been driven by the tremendous growth of public DNA and protein sequence information due to the Human Genome Project and now the explosion of microarray gene expression data. Yet the ability of scientists to make use of this vast resource of data is limited by the quality of the bioinformatics tools that are available to them. In particular, the current generation of bioinformatics tools generally lack efficient, intuitive user interfaces, which acts as a barrier for many investigators.

Our group provieds bioinformatics consulting and develops new bioinformatics software We provide a database and analysis software service for gene expression microarrays and supervise the data processing pipeline for high-throughput DNA sequencing.

I act as bioinformatics consultant for NYU Medical Center, collaborating as needed on a wide range of research projects. The extent of these collaborations ranges from a few consultation meetings to co-investigator on NIH grants. I am currently working on projects that include metagenomics (Human Microbiome Project), the genetic variation in the malaria parasite, and analysis of human microarray data from a variety of clinical and basic science research projects. Other projects that I have recently worked on include the discovery of new brain-specific proteases in the public EST database, discovery of antigens using a pattern based search of complete genome sequences, identification of bacterial genes linked to severe dental caries, and an evolutionary analysis of the mammalian glucosidase gene family.