Bioinformatics Training Program

Raymond J. CarrollDepartment of Statistics

Faculty of Nutrition

Texas A&M Universityhttp://stat.tamu.edu/~carroll

Official Name

• Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and the Biological Basis of Nutrition and Cancer

• Hence the clever acronym: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/b3nc

History

• Roughly in 1997, Steve Safe started the idea of a Center for Environmental and Rural Health

• He needed a Biostatistics Research Core, and Jim Calvin nominated me.

History

• A major point of the CERH was to foster interdisciplinary contacts

• Steve and Jim said: well you do nutrition, go talk to them

• I met Nancy Turner at a reception to start off

History

• Nancy first started telling me about her data, namely the idea of colonic crypts

• She drew these by hand: I wished I had saved the original pictures

History

• I then started talking with Nancy, Joanne Lupton and their student, Meeyoung Hong

• Very cool: hierarchical functional data!

• With location effects!

History

• Naisyin Wang and I then gave the problem of these data to our student, Jeff Morris

• Jeff started spending lots of time in the lab, and became very knowledgeable about the biology

History

• I was at U-Penn for 2 years, and just before coming back spent a week at the Canyon Ranch in Tucson

• Very fancy food, nothing to do

History

• I wrote the first draft of the original Bioinformatics training program grant at Canyon ranch

• I called a person at the NCI, and she suggested that I apply for a R25T, rather than a T32.

• The difference: faculty salary money!

History

• We also met Ed Dougherty of EE, who wrote an early paper on cDNA arrays

• Robb Chapkin was a huge help in the proposal as well

Our Goal

• Our goal is to train statistically oriented individuals (Biostatisticians, Statisticians, Signal Processors, etc.)

• To function as independent researchers in a multidisciplinary environment focusing on Nutrition and cancer.

The Challenge

• Even the Program Officer at the NCI thought we would not be able to recruit trainees

• Because of the restriction to U.S. citizens and permanent residents

They Were Wrong!

• We recruited a Danh Nguyen from statistics (2001)

• Aniruddha Datta from EE

Recruits in 2002

• Two statisticians:

• Qi Zheng

• Mahlet Tadesse

Our First Pre-doc (2002)

• Christie Spinka

Recruits in 2003

• Ivan Ivanov

• Kimberley Drews

• Wenjiang Fu

Recruits in 2004

• Michael Swartz

He has a twin brother Richard, but these are actually two of Michael (I think)

Resubmission in 2005

• We have added a rotation through the Genomics Facility Core

• We have a systematic plan for rotations through labs, with a final choice late in fall of year 1

Resubmission in 2005

• We received the best score in our round!!

• We are now funded through July 2011

• I am looking forward (not!) to 2010 resubmission

Recruits in 2005

• Erchin Serepedin

• Lan Zhou

Recruits in 2006

• Ann Chen

• Sujay Datta

Other Mentors

Marina VannucciGuoyao Wu Rosemary WalzemDavid Dahl

Jerry Tsai Phil MirkesLaurie Davidson

Bani Mallick

Future Plans

Administrative Assistant

Joyce Sutherland runs the day-to-day operations for our Program, and for the proposed new

Center for Statistical Bioinformatics

Thanks!

http://stat.tamu.edu/~carroll