My group develops novel AI methods to analyze multi-modal genomic, clinical and imaging data to investigate disease molecular mechanisms, define disease subtypes and identify effectors of disease onset and progression.
Since coming to UF, I have been able to secure National Institutes of Health funding through the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute for two four-year R01 grants. In addition, we had several high-profile publications, including one in The Lancet Rheumatology, in which we developed a new scoring system for childhood Sjögren’s disease; one in PLoS Medicine, in which we identify effectors of incident chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD; and one in eClinicalMedicine, in which we identified effectors of all-cause and COPD-specific mortality in people with COPD.
We are currently expanding our analysis for chronic lung diseases to incorporate high-dimensional DNA methylation data (to use for both mechanistic studies and for disease subtyping) and incorporate clinical imaging information in our predictive models. The first project is one of two recently-funded R01 grants; for the second, we hope to generate new pilot results and apply for funding to NIH or the Department of Defense.