When: 2:00pm Tuesday 12 January 2016
Where: Meeting Room 408, Building No. 24, Weijin Road Campus
Speaker: Professor Zhang Guanlan (Boston University)
About the Speaker: Dr. Zhang Guanglan currently holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of Metropolitan College (MET) at Boston University (BU). She develops and teaches graduate courses for Master of Science in Computer Information Systems and leads the research effort at health informatics research lab at MET. She is the faculty coordinator for Health Informatics program, organizing teaching activities in the program. She also holds part-time position at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her research focus has been in machine learning, data mining, and knowledge management in biomedical and healthcare field. Her major research interests include computational modeling of complex biological processes, such as the identification of vaccine targets, the development of a framework for rapid development of next-generation biological databases, the building of analytical tools for pattern recognition from biomedical data, and the design of diagnostic tools. During the 17 years of pursuing research in biomedical and health sciences, she has authored more than 40 journal publications, developed more than 20 online computational systems, and filed two patents as co-inventors. In one of the online computational systems, MULTIPRED, a novel data representation method was employed to predict peptides that bind to multiple HLA alleles belonging to one HLA supertype by a single prediction. The main utility of MULTIPRED is in the selection of key antigenic regions to minimize the number of experiments required for mapping of vaccine targets with broad population coverage. The paper describing MULTIPRED - “MULTIPRED: a computational system for prediction of promiscuous HLA binding peptides”, has been cited 128 times so far. Through the development of advanced computational solutions, she contributes to the rapid progress of basic and applied biology and biomedicine.
Organizer: School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University
