Principal Investigators
Dr. Lawrence Mays
Dr. Lawrence Mays is a professor in the department of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte. His primary responsibility at UNC Charlotte is the development of Bioinformatics. Prior to coming to Charlotte in January 2004, he was a professor and department chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. During his 27 years at UAB, Dr. Mays received grant awards from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the EyeSight Foundation, the Keck Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. The development of bioinformatics in Charlotte offers a unique set of problems and opportunities. Dr. Mays' goal is to identify several areas for the development of programs of excellence that utilize our local resources (students, faculty, institutions, community, and industry). He is also working to establish a network of collaborators and the appropriate educational and training programs.
Dr. Ann Loraine
Dr. Ann Loraine is an Associate Professor in the Bioinformatics Research Center at UNC Charlotte, where she is setting up a combined computational biology and experimental biology “wet lab.” This lab will focus on using gene expression and other genomic data to characterize regulatory and metabolic networks in plants. She also heads a project funded by the National Science Foundation that will create visualization and data distribution software for Arabidopsis, a “model” plant used to study the many aspects of plant biology. Prior to UNC Charlotte, Dr. Loraine was an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also has spent time in industry, working for Affymetrix as a bioinformatics scientist. Dr. Loraine received undergraduate degrees in zoology and liberal arts from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in plant molecular biology from the University of California at Berkeley. http://www.transvar.org
Dr. Wei Sha
Dr. Wei Sha is a research associate in the Bioinformatics Research Center at UNC Charlotte. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech in 2006. She also holds a M.S. in Biology from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelor’s degree in Medicine from the Capital University of Medical Sciences in China. Her doctoral and postdoctoral studies have focused on the statistical analysis of transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics data. Her papers have been published in prestigious journals, such as PNAS, Bioinformatics and BMC Bioinformatics. She is currently collaborating with Dr. Steven Zeisel’s group in the Nutrition Research Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill to study the different responses at the transcriptomics and metabolomics levels to a choline-deficient diet in human subjects with different genetic polymorphisms. She is working to establish more collaborations in the NC Research Campus. Her goal is to develop novel bioinformatics tools and to provide excellent bioinformatics services to research institutes, private corporations and health care organizations within and outside of NC Research Campus.
Dr. Xiuxia Du
Dr. Du is an associate professor in the Bioinformatics Research Center at UNC Charlotte. She received her Ph.D. from Washington University in systems science and mathematics in 2005. Prior to her PhD, Dr. Du received a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Hefei University of Technology in China. Her research addresses computational and statistical problems for mass spectrometry-based proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, and interactomics. Currently, her research focuses on: (1) the development of algorithms to identify protein-protein interactions using chemical crosslinking; (2) statistical analysis (e.g. estimation of false discovery rate) of peptide and protein identifications; (3) the development of algorithms to analyze time-course data. Dr. Du’s long-term goal is to conduct systems level analysis of the dynamics of biological systems using –omics data and facilitate studies of the mechanisms of normal and abnormal biological functions.
Dr. Cory Brouwer
Dr. Cory R. Brouwer is Director of the Bioinformatics Services Division and Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte. He and his team provide a wide range of bioinformatics and computational biology services to the NCRC, UNC Charlotte and surrounding area life sciences community. Some recent projects have involved de novo assembly of genomes and transcriptomes using next generation sequencing, clinical association studies and comparative genomics. Before coming to UNC Charlotte, Dr. Brouwer was leading a global computational biology group for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer out of their Sandwich, UK research campus located southeast of London. During his tenure at Pfizer, he led various efforts in data integration, text mining, collaborative knowledge building and scientific software development supporting genomics and systems biology. He also was an active promoter of pre-competitive collaboration within the pharma industry and was co-chair of the Knowledge and Information Services domain of the Pistoia Alliance, a cross-pharma precompetitive standards organization. He joined Pfizer from Curagen Corporation, where he led software projects in the area of gene expression, proteomics and toxicoinformatics. Dr. Brouwer gained agbiotech experience at Pioneer Hi-Bred, Intl, Inc. working as a computational biologist focusing on genetics and comparative genomics. Dr. Brouwer received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Iowa State University.