Dr. Robin Dowell

Dr. Robin Dowell's talk will be on genomes, machine learning and personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine seeks to individualize prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. Technology, including genome sequencing, continues to play a vital role in our evolving model of personalized medicine. The cost of genome sequencing continues to drop making interpretation of individual genomes a grand challenge. Dr. Dowell's laboratory utilizes machine learning to better understand the impact of individual variations in human genomics. She will review the human genome, how genomics is influencing medicine and her laboratory's efforts in deciphering human genomes. Finally, she will discuss her own career journey and how it was influenced by her doctorate in biomedical engineering.  

Dr. Robin Dowell has been honored as a Linda Crnic Institute Investigator, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, and as a Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Fellow. In her postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, she developed Sigma1278b, a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as a model system for comparative genomics– sequencing, transcriptome profiling, and building a deletion library. She compared transcription factor binding locations between mouse and human hepatocytes, and showed that binding locations show high turn-over rate. Additionally, Dowell developed novel approaches to ChIP-chip peak calling (using shear distribution as a prior on shape of peak), clustering expression profiles (using dirichlet methods and topic models), and for detecting transcription in tiling microarrays.

She is interested in problems that lie at the intersection between genetics/genomics and machine learning. Areas of interest include probabilistic modeling, comparative genomics, machine learning, transcription, regulation, aneuploidy, RNA secondary structure prediction. Currently, she works in Dowell Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dr. Robin Dowell will be coming to speak to us on Wednesday, September 27, from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. The presentation will be held in Duane Physics, Room G125.