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. Cynthia Gibas
Dr. Cynthia Gibas received her Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. She subsequently worked as a bioinformatics software developer and analyst at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In 1999, she took a faculty position at Virginia Tech and was involved in the development of their Bioinformatics graduate programs and the initial formation of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. In 2005 she moved to UNC-Charlotte to take on similar challenges here. Her research is in computational modeling of molecular interactions. Her major funding is from NIH; the project titled "Biophysical Optimization of Oligonucleotide Microarrays" aims to produce empirically-validated
computational models for analysis of long-oligonucleotide microarrays.
Dr. Anthony Fodor
Anthony Fodor is an assistant professor at the Bioinformatics Research Center at UNC Charlotte. He holds a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Washington. He has worked as a developer of scientific database applications in support of high throughput small molecule efforts for the biotechnology company Immunex (now Amgen). He has extensive experience in both client and server side Java development. His research interests include novel algorithm development and the functional genomics of ion channels.
Dr. Dennis Livesay
Dr. Dennis Livesay has an NIH grant to study protein backbone flexibility. The Livesay lab, along with Don Jacobs from the Department of Physics and Optical Science, is funded from the NIH to investigate the relationships between protein mechanical flexibility and thermodynamic stability. This information is critical for a proper understanding of protein evolution, as particular motions are critically related to function, while thermodynamics dictate whether or not the protein will fold into its proper shape. When this delicate balance between stability and flexibility is lost, proteins cease to function properly, will denature, and misfolding can ensue.
Dr. Jennifer Weller
Dr. Jennifer Weller is a co-PI with Dr. Gibas on the NIH microarray optimization award and received NC Biotech startup funding for a DNA sequencer to be used for the discovery and validation of human single nucleotide polymorphisms, also known as SNPs. Her research interests include the genomics of individual variation in disease response and integration of data across multi-platform microarray experiments.
Dr. Jun Tao Guo
Dr. Jun-Tao Guo is an Assistant Professor in the Bioinformatics Research Center, College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his PhD degree in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry from the University of Kentucky in 2001. While doing his PhD thesis research under the guidance of Professor Mark S. Kindy, he became interested in the field of bioinformatics and was fascinated by the idea of solving biological problems computationally. He entered the graduate program in Computer Science and received a Master’s degree shortly after. He then started his bioinformatics career in 2001 in Dr. Ying Xu’s lab at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. His research interests are in the broad area of structural bioinformatics. Specifically, he is interested in protein structure prediction, protein-DNA interactions and their applications in deciphering biological regulatory networks through an integrated methodology of computational prediction and wet-lab experiment. He is also interested in the evolution of regulatory pathways.
Dr. Zhengchang Su
Dr. Zhengchang Su is an Associate Professor in the Bioinformatics Research Center, College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research focuses on the development of novel algorithms for deciphering gene regulatory networks using sequence and other high throughput data, and simulation of 3D structures of macromolecules using high performance computing.
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