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Announcements from the Dean for Research and Graduate Education

Announcements:
New Institute for Integrated Physiology
Nanduri Prabhakar, PhD, D.Sc., has been named the inaugural Director of the Institute for Integrated Physiology. Created to be the intellectual home for multidisciplinary research emphasizing systems level physiology, the Institute will serve as the intellectual home for faculty members working in various areas of physiology that combine the concepts of cellular/molecular physiology with biochemistry, applying these concepts with experimental approaches to understand function at the level of the whole animal or organ. Under Dr. Prabhakar's leadership, the Institute will have the goals of increasing the visibility of physiology at the University of Chicago, initiating new collaborative research programs, and overseeing key physiology training for medical, graduate and undergraduate students.

Welcome New Faculty Research Recruits
Hongyuan Cao, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Health, Biostatistics. Dr. Hongyuan Cao recently received her PhD in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has done innovative work in statistical and computational methods for large complex data sets. Her work focuses on the multiple testing problem that arises when investigating a large number of features (such as genes) from a relatively smaller number of samples (such as patients). Her work uses the mathematical theory of moderate deviations to develop powerful new multiple testing procedures.

Lin Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Studies, Biostatistics. Dr. Lin Chen recently joined the Department of Health Studies from the Fred Hutchinson Research Center where she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate. She has done outstanding work in causal modeling and statistical inference on gene regulation and gene regulatory networks. Her work focuses on statistical methods for analysis of high-dimensioned genomics and proteomics data. Her work makes innovative use of regularized regression in high-dimensional settings.

Robert Grossman, PhD, joined the faculty on September 1, 2010 as Professor of Medicine in the Section of Genetic Medicine, Director of Informatics, Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He has expertise in cloud computing, database development and data mining.

Jill de Jong, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics section of Hematology/Oncology. Her research focuses on ematopoietic stem cells. She studies the genes that regulate HSCs in vivo during development, during adult homeostasis and after bone marrow transplantation, using the zebrafish animal model to study hematopoietic stem cells.

Edwin Munro, PhD, joined the faculty in 2009 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology. Dr. Munro's research utilizes molecular engineering to understand cell polarity and the regulation of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton and the control of flow within cells. He has pioneered a combination imaging techniques, molecular genetics, mathematical modeling and physical manipulations to elucidate these processes.

Brandon Pierce, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Studies. In 2008, Dr. Brandon Pierce completed his doctoral degree in Public Health Genetics at the University of Washington. Brandon then joined the Department of Health Studies as a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. Habib Ahsan and accepted a faculty position in 2010. Dr. Pierce's research is aimed at elucidating the etiologies of various cancers, including breast and prostate cancer, focusing on the role of genetic, molecular, and environmental risk factors, and interactions among these factors. Dr. Pierce's current research projects include genome-wide association studies of cancer risk and prognosis, studies of gene-environment interactions related to cancer, and studies that examine methods for causal inference using genetic data.

Michael Rust, PhD, Assistant Professor, Cell & Molecular Biology, Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and a Chicago Biomedical Consortium Junior Investigator. Dr. Rust's research combines optical microscopy of living cells and single molecules with biochemistry and mathematical modeling to understand the function of small networks of strongly interacting biological molecules.

Alexander Ruthenburg, PhD, has been appointed the Neubauer Family Foundation Endowed Assistant Professor and a Chicago Biomedical Consortium Junior Investigator in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology. Dr. Ruthenburg is studying molecular mechanisms that underlie genome management; his work is highly multidisciplinary, bringing together structural biology, chemistry, biochemistry, proteomics and genomics.