Bioinformatics: Data-Driven Approaches to Health & Disease
Modern biology is defined by data. Advances in sequencing, imaging, and high-throughput molecular profiling have made it possible to observe biological systems at unprecedented resolution--across genomes, cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems.
At the same time, these technologies pose one of the field's greatest challenges: biological systems are inherently high-dimensional, multi-scale, and dynamic, making it difficult to learn their underlying structure and predict how perturbations propagate through the system.
Bioinformatics uses biology, statistics, mathematics, and computer science to uncover patterns hidden within massive and complex biological datasets. These approaches enable discoveries that would be impossible through experimental biology alone, allowing researchers to interpret billions of measurements simultaneously and translate raw sequence data into biological insight. Once discovered, the IGS team codifies this knowledge through development and dissemination of ontologies.
IGS researchers advance cutting-edge bioinformatics, data science, AI, and software engineering approaches that enable mechanistic interpretation of high-throughput data sets central to modern biomedical research. Our expertise spans genome assembly, genetic variation, multiomic analysis, regulatory network interference, and integrative systems biology enabling investigators to move from raw sequencing data to biological insight.
We develop novel analytical methods and salable computational workflows while applying these approaches to complex biological questions involving human health, microbial communities, and disease processes.
Through federated data ecosystems, standards development, and interoperable infrastructure, we make complex datasets easier to find, access, and compute upon, enabling reproducible and data-driven discovery.
In addition to research programs, IGS provides shared bioinformatics and high-performance computing resources that democratize access to advanced data science tools across the research community at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and nationally. Our bioinformaticians work in our Genome Informatics Core (GIC) and in tandem with Maryland Genomics to provide custom and comprehensive bioinformatics services to researchers on campus and beyond. The GIC staff has built a set of robust data management and visualization tools that are used to democratize bioinformatics and clinical informatics analysis and visualization to researchers within IGS, across the campus, and around the world.
Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Faculty
Dr. Giglio has been working in analysis of omics data for more than 25 years. She focuses on metadata harmonization and standardization to facilitate the efficient exchange and reuse of biomedical data. Data standardization makes it possible for researchers to engage in effective data mining and analysis of the enormous quantity of multiomic data that is continuously being produced, leading to hypothesis generation, and discovery of new knowledge. Dr. Giglio has applied her work in data harmonization and standardization to multiple data coordination centers associated with large consortia including the Human Microbiome Project (an NIH Common Fund program) and the Neuroscience Multi-Omic (NeMO) Archive (part of the NIH BRAIN Initiative).
Mike is a molecular microbiologist more than two decades' experience in the application of genomics and next generation sequencing approaches in the fields of microbiome, public health, environmental sciences, and clinical diagnostics. Mike serves as the Technical Director for Maryland Genomics where he’s responsible for laboratory Research and Development, new assay development, automation systems, and technical and laboratory workflows for the many projects within IGS's research and clinical diagnostics portfolio.
Anup Mahurkar is IGS's Chief Information Officer and the Director of its Informatics Resource Center. He has extensive experience in the field of genomics and health sciences where he has worked as a researcher, engineer, and manager over the past 30 years. During this time, he has overseen the work of scientists, engineers, system administrators, and managers in research environments. His areas of expertise include genome analysis, web-based analysis and visualization tool development, building scalable analysis systems, database design, and high-throughput computing architecture and application development. He leads a team of researchers, engineers, analysts, and IT professionals responsible for production bioinformatics activities, custom bioinformatics analysis, new tool development, and systems engineering. His group also develops visualization tools. He has more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals from the group.
Dr. White is an internationally recognized expert in bioinformatics with more than 15 years of experience. He leads a team of scientists and engineers at IGS which develop production-level pipelines, databases, and tools for automated and manual analysis of genomic and metagenomic data. Dr. White and his group design socio-technical frameworks that enable large, multi-institutional research collaborations through consensus governance, standardized metadata, and coordinated data processing and sharing. Their work supports robust data ingestion, curation, harmonization, and uniform processing to create broadly accessible multiomic resources. His group also develops visualization and analytical tools, facilitates consortium-wide publications, and expands community access to complex biomedical datasets through outreach and collaboration.
Other Faculty Working in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
CAMRI: Center for Advanced Microbiology & Research Innovation
Cancer Genomics
Human & Population Genomics