Bioinformatics & Systems Biology Research Areas

The Bioinformatics & Systems Biology doctoral program covers a wide array of topics to address questions in biomedical research from novel algorithm development to the application of bioinformatics tools for innovative research.

The expertise of the participating faculty members varies widely from pure wet lab research to pure computational research. Students have the option to choose co-mentors to provide bioinformatics and biological expertise or to or work exclusively with one mentor with bioinformatics expertise. Most of the research projects involve bioinformatic data analyses either preceding (hypothesis-generation) or succeeding (hypothesis-testing) an experimental component.

New method or algorithm development in bioinformatics

Active method/algorithm development in the areas of cancer genomics, neuroinformatics, immunoinformatics, microbial metagenomics, structural bioinformatics, graph-theory based biological network analysis, and natural language processing (NLP).

Application of bioinformatics in systems biology research

Research in this area typically involves both experimental and bioinformatics aspects of a project in a basic science research laboratory at UNMC. Broad research topics include analysis of multi-omic datasets (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc), pathway and network analyses, agent-based modeling, drug repurposing, microbiome characterization in health and disease states, etc.

Mathematical/statistical applications in bioinformatics

Developing novel statistical approaches to study splice variants in human cancers or immunogenicity of protein variants, survival analysis and disease risk prediction using molecular and clinical datasets, mathematical modeling to characterize/visualize high-dimensional experimental data in biology, etc.