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Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Heersink School of Medicine

Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

ATTIS 2022

f10e464b2574f81171472f72f4d7d0e4533e77bdOn April 22nd, the UAB Informatics Institute and Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) virtually hosted the Sixth Annual Translational and Transformative Informatics Symposium (ATTIS). The symposium provided attendees from across the country (faculty, postdoc trainees, graduate students) the opportunity to report progress on the latest informatics research and applications in biomedical sciences. Themes of the 2022 ATTIS symposium focused on bioinformatics methods, genomics, cancer genomics, single-cell genomics, clinical genomics and epigenomics. 

The keynote speakers for ATTIS were Ting Wang, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, and Roel Veerhaak, Ph.D., Professor and Associate Director of Computational Biology at The Jackson Laboratory.  

During the symposium, technical talk sessions were moderated by faculty members of the Informatics Institute, with various discussions presented to attendees, ranging from topics focusing on statistical enrichment analysis to new opportunities within the world of computational biology. The names of the presenters and discussions for the technical talks session were:

  • “Probing the Glioblastoma Kinome” (Ryan Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Director of Division of Neuropathology, Department of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham)
  • “Statistical Enrichment Analysis of Sample Clinical Attributes Using SEAS” (Jake Chen, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Computer Science, Informatics Institute, University of Alabama at Birmingham)
  • “The Motif Composition of Variable-Number Tandem Repeats Impacts Gene Expression” (Mark Chaisson, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California)
  • “Informatics to Unleash the Power of Biomedical Big Data: Genetic, EHR, and Imaging” (Degui Zhi, Ph.D., MS Associate Professor, Director, Center for AI & Genome Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
  • “Recent Advances in Vitamin D Signaling: New Opportunities for Computational Biology” (Andrzej T. Slominski, M.D. Ph.D.,Department of Dermatology, University of Alabama at Birmingham)
  • “Investigating the Mutational Features of Pathogenic Structural Variants in Genomic Disorders Using Long-read Sequencingand Optical Mapping” (Claudia M.B. Carvalho Fonseca, Ph.D., Assistant Investigator, Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI)
  • “Harnessing Big Data for Precision Oncology” (Leng Han, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Texas A&M Institute of Biosciences and Technology)
  • Methods for Characterizing Structural Variants with High-throughput Sequencing Data” (Maizie Zhou, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University)
  • “Single‐cell Transcriptome Analysis of Cerebrospinal Fluid Identifies Circulating Tumor Cells of Lung Cancer Brain Metastases” (Xu Wang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Auburn University)

Speakers for the Career Development Session included: 

  • Matthew Might, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  • Chen Su, Ph.D., Senior Director, Enterprise High Performance Computing, Eli Lilly and Company
  • Chindo Hicks, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center
  • Ann Loraine, Ph.D., Professor of Bioinformatics, University of North Carolina-Charlotte

To watch the recordings of ATTIS 2022, please click the following links:

Contributors and organizers for ATTIS 2022 included: 

Zechen Chong, Ph.D. (Program Chair), Jim Cimino, M.D., Jake Chen, Ph.D. (General Chairs), Amy Wang, M.D., Nafisa Ajala (Webmaster), Ryan McCain (Promotions and Marketing), and Amanda Carballo (Logistics)