The advancement of technologies for high-throughput collection of molecular and clinical data, has inadvertently transformed biology and medicine.  Integrating and co-analyzing these different data streams has become the research bottleneck and, in all likelihood, will be a central research topic for the next decade.  My group has historically worked on the development of statistical and computational methods to identify key molecules (genes, microRNAs, etc) that affect biological processes, disease onset and progression.  We are also interested in how we can combine the power of genomics with the rich multi-scale data that are available in biology and medicine. In this talk, I will present some of our work in investigating the molecular mechanisms and identifying subtypes of chronic lung diseases (COPD, IPF) as well as our recent efforts on causal modeling over mixed data types (continuous and discrete variables) and how to apply them to address important biomedical and clinical questions.

Takis Benos 
Professor of Epidemiology, PHHP and COM
University of Florida