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faculty profile |
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| Dr. Jennifer Weller |
| Associate Professor |
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Department: Computer Science | Bioinformatics Research Center |
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Office: Cameron Research Center 220 |
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Office Hours: By appointment |
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Email: jweller2@uncc.edu |
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Phone: 704-687-7678 |
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Research Description:
Dr. Jennifer Weller received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Montana in 1990. She subsequently did a post-doc at Michigan State University and the Carnegie Insitute at Stanford University, before joining the biotechnology company PE/Applied Biosystems in 1994. After 5 years in R & D working on automated molecular marker and gene expression systems, she moved to the National Center for Genome Resources in 1999 to work more specifically on the bioinformatics research associated with high-throughput genomics research. After a year as research faculty at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech she moved to a tenure-track faculty position in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology department at George Mason University in 2002. Dr. Weller joined the department at UNCC in June 2007.
Dr. Weller's current research interests are in the management, analysis and data mining of large-volume genomics data, in particular data streams coming from array platforms. There are serious data cleansing issues associated with the continuous updating of the annotation of 'completed' genomes as well as the impact of individual variation on how measurements are interpreted. Once the data has been carefully filtered there are large challenges associated with integrating chromosomal data, including various aberrations, and allelic variation such as SNPs, with epigenetic effects such as those measured with chromatin immunoprecipitation, and expression variation as evidenced in mRNA, small RNA and alternative transcript forms. Acquiring coherent data sets from a common group of samples across each of the platforms is one of the goals in the first experiments in the wet (hydrophilic) lab, while designing databases and cleansing/retrieval scripts to produce high quality input data sets for multi-scale analyses and high-dimensional visualization tools are the dry (hydrophobic) lab goals. Dr. Weller also collaborates with Dr. Cynthia Gibas in an NIH funded project studying the biophysical characteristics of hybridization events on microarray surfaces. |
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Recent Publications:
Mao, C., Cushman, J.C., May, G.D., Weller, J.W. “ESTAP – an automated system for the analysis of EST data” Bioinformatics (2003) 19: 1720-1722.
Ratushna, V., Weller, J., Gibas, C. “Secondary structure as a confounding factor in synthetic oligomer microarray design” BMC Genomics (2005) 6:31.
Lee, J.K., Laudeman, T., Kanter, J., James, T., Siadaty, M.S., Knaus, W.A., Prorok, A., Bao, Y., Freeman, B., Puiu, D., Wen, L., Buck, G.A., Schlauch, K., Weller, J., Mangalam, H.J., Fox, J.W. “GeneX Va: VBC Open Source Microarray Database and Analysis Software for Multiple Users in Biomedical Research Benchmarks,
Higgs, B., J. Weller, et al. (2005). “On Spectral Embedding for Extraction of Structure in Biological Data”. Joint Statistical Meeting 2005 - Using Our Discipline to Enhance Human Welfare, Minneapolis, Minnesota, ASA.
Higgs BW., Solka JL., Weller J. (2005) Deriving Meaningful Biological Structure from Spectral Embedding and Clustering. Computing Science and Statistics. 37.
Higgs, B.W., Weller, J.W. and Solka, J.L. (2006) “Spectral Embedding Finds Meaningful (Relevant) Structure in Image and Microarray Data” BMC Bioinformatics 7:74.
Overall, CC, Solka, JL, Weller, JW, Priebe, CE “Anomaly Detection in Genetic Networks.” Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM). Seattle, WA, August 6-10, 2006.
Overall, CC, Solka, JL, Weller, JW, Priebe, CE. “Using Scan Statistics for Anomaly Detection in Genetic Networks.” Classification Society of North America (CSNA). Rutgers, NJ, May 10-13, 2006.
Overall, CC, Solka, JL, Priebe, CE, Weller, JW, Using Scan Statistics for Anomaly Detection in Genetic Regulatory Networks. Quantitative Methods in Defense and National Security (QMDNS). Fairfax, VA, February 7-8, 2007.
Kumari, S., Verma, L., and Weller, J. (2007) “AffyMAPSDetector: A Tool To Detect SNPs In Affymetrix GeneChipTM Expression Arrays” BMC Bioinformatics 8:276.
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Research Areas:
Bioinformatics, Biophysics, and Computational Biology
Complex Diseases and Gene by Environment Interactions in Eukaryotic Systems
Gene Regulatory Network Analysis
Microarray Data Generation, Cleansing and Analysis
Nucleic Acid Structure
Statistical and Scientific Database Design
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