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Clinical Genomic Analysis Workshop 2011
June 2, 2011
Organized by IBM Haifa Research Lab

Bio's

David Golan, Tel Aviv University
David graduated from the Adi-Lautman interdisciplinary program for excellent students in TAU in 2010. During his four years in the program he completed a M.Sc in mathematics and a M.A in economics. During this time he also collaborated with Dr. Noam Shomron (TAU Sackler faculty of medicine) on several bioinformatics projects exploring various aspects of microRNAs. Since June 2010 David is working on his PhD in statistical genetics under the supervision of Dr. Saharon Rosset.


Dan Geiger, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Professor Geiger's main research is focused on the study of probabilistic models for intelligent systems, in particular, the study of Bayesian networks and their applications in Bioinformatics and in other domains. His main contributions have focused on several aspects of Bayesian networks, including, (1) Foundation - which independence assumptions are encoded in a Bayesian network, (2) Exact Inference - how to efficiently answer queries using a Bayesian network, (3) Learning - how to learn Bayesian networks from data, and (4) Applications - building effective intelligent systems based on Bayesian networks. Currently Geiger focuses on building state of the art software packages that help geneticists map genes for diseases either by linkage studies, association studies, and other methods. Geiger earned a PhD degree under the guidance of Judea Pearl in 1990, and since then he is a member of the academic staff at the Techion Israel Institute of Technology.


Ehud Aharoni, IBM Research - Haifa
Mr. Aharoni is a Research Staff Member in the Machine Learning and Data Mining group, at the Analytics department at Haifa research labs. He received B.A. and M.A degrees in computer science from the Technion, Haifa in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He joined IBM research in 2003, and since then has worked on various machine learning related project in the domains of hardware verification, bio-informatics and anomaly detection.


Yves Moreau, University of Leuven
I am currently a professor of engineering at the University of Leuven. I do research on computational methods for diagnosis and disease gene discovery in congenital genetic disorders. I teach several bioinformatics courses, mainly focusing on probabilistic models in computational biology. I am an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. I am a co-founder of two spin-off starts of the university (Data4s, now part of Norkom Technologies, specialized in data-mining for the banking industry, and Cartagenia, specialized in IT solutions for clinical genetic diagnosis). I chaired the 2010 edition of the European Conference on Computational Biology.

I received the Master in Electrical Engineering from the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium in 1992. Thanks to a Fulbright grant, I went on to complete a Master in Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1994, I moved back to Belgium at K.U.Leuven ESAT-SCD, where I received the Ph.D. in 1998. Between 1998 and 2005, I was a postdoctoral researcher (FWO-Vlaanderen) and assistant professor at ESAT-SCD, developing our bioinformatics research. In 2003-2004, I was a visiting researcher at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark. Since 2004, I have been a lecturer and professor at ESAT-SCD. I currently coordinate SymBioSys, the K.U.Leuven Center for Computational Systems Biology.


Zohar Yakhini, Agilent Laboratories and the Technion
Dr Zohar Yakhini is currently Master Scientist at Agilent Laboratories and Adjunct Faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the Technion, Haifa. After his PhD in mathematics at Stanford University 1997 he is focusing on computational biology and bioinformatics research, emphasizing statistical and algorithmic aspects of microarrays and other high throughput measurement technologies. Dr Yakhini led data analysis work in several early gene expression studies. He then led the development of probe design and data analysis methods and software tools for Agilent's CGH and methylation microarray platforms. Dr Yakhini's group developed and continues to improve several algorithms and data analysis tools that are widely used by the genomics community, including aberration calling, differential expression and statistical enrichment analysis tools.


Ron Shamir, Tel Aviv University
Prof. Ron Shamir leads the Computational Genomics group at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University (TAU). He is the head of the Edmond J. Safra Bioinformatics Program at TAU and holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics. He focuses on developing novel algorithmic methods in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. His research interests include gene expression analysis, modeling and dissection of molecular networks, gene regulation and cancer genomics. Methods and software tools developed by Shamir's group are in use by many laboratories around the world.
Shamir received a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from the Hebrew University in 1977, and a PhD in Operations Research from UC Berkeley in 1984. He is on the faculty of TAU since 1987. He has published over 200 scientific works, including 14 books and edited volumes, and supervised 45 graduate students to date. He is on the editorial board of eleven scientific journals and series, and was a founding member of the RECOMB Conference series steering committee for thirteen years. In 2000 he founded the Bioinformatics undergraduate program at TAU. He co-founded the Israeli Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and was society president in 2004-2006. He is a recipient of the 2011 Landau Prize in Bioinformatics.


Eran Halperin, Tel Aviv University
Dr. Eran Halperin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and in the department of Biotechnology in Tel-Aviv University. He is also affiliated with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California. He is a computational biologist who develops methods to analyze human genetic variation in the context of complex human diseases. His group has developed methods that have been used by hundreds of researchers worldwide to understand the genetic causes of diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and asthma.
Dr. Halperin has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles across different disciplines such as human genetics, computational biology, computer science, and operations research. His works have been published in journals such as Science, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, and Bioinformatics. He received various honors for academic achievements, including the Rothschild Fellowship and the Krill Prize.
Dr. Halperin received his Ph.D. in computer science from Tel-Aviv University. Prior to his current positions, he held research and postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Princeton University. Additionally, Dr Halperin held positions in the industry, including in Compugen, and Navigenics, a personalized genomics company where he served as the Director of Bioinformatics.


Ehud Shapiro, Weizmann Institute of Science
Prof. Ehud Shapiro is now a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and Biological Chemistry, and incumbent of the Harry Weinrebe Chair of Computer Science and Biology. He was awarded a B.A./B.Sc. degree with distinction in Mathematics and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 1979, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1982. Prof. Shapiro is the author and editor of several Computer Science books published by MIT Press as well as an editor of the MIT Press Series in Logic Programming, and the author of numerous scientific publications.




































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