People

Alper Uzun, PhD Principle Investigator

Dr. Uzun received his training in molecular biology at Istanbul University and furthered his education in medical biochemistry at Kocaeli University in Turkey. This foundation led him to pursue advanced degrees in computational biology and bioinformatics, earning both a Master’s and a PhD from Northeastern University.

Following his PhD, Dr. Uzun continued his training under the guidance of Prof. James Padbury in the Department of Pediatrics at the Women and Infants Hospital, and Prof. Sorin Istrail in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. In 2012, he was appointed as an Instructor of Pediatrics, and by 2014, he was promoted to the role of Assistant Professor of Pediatrics.

Dr. Uzun currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University, with a secondary appointment in Pediatrics. He also serves as the Director of Cancer Bioinformatics at the Legorreta Cancer Center. In his laboratory, he combines next-generation sequencing, big data analytics, and bioinformatics techniques with network biology methodologies. This interdisciplinary approach allows his team to delve into the genetic architecture of complex diseases, with a special focus on cancer research.

Current members

	Benjamin Ahn, Medical Student	Network biology of cancer subtypes.
	Erin Chang, Medical Student	Network biology of neuroblastoma. Focused in comparative network analysis of neuroblastoma and wet lab validations.
	Abhinav Chede, Undergraduate Student	Developing cancer gene identifier for cancer networks to find motifs and signatures.
	Jennifer Chen, Computer Science and Biology, Undergraduate Student	Developing user interfaces for comparative network biology analysis. Focused in building user friendly web interfaces for the outputs of cancer subtypes of PPI networks.
	Valentina Grether, Biomedical Engineering, Undergraduate Student	Structure biology on Preeclampsia. Focused in protein modeling and variant analysis.
	Suin Jung, Undergraduate Student	Examining melanoma involves a network biology approach, taking into account environmental impacts and the burden of mutations.
	Jennifer Li, Computer Science, Undergraduate Student	Tool development, variant data visualization. Focused in front end development and creating state of the art user friendly visualizations.
	Meiyi Song, Computational Biology, Undergraduate Student	Identfying conserved network modules across different cancer-specific protein-protein interaction networks.
	Nitin Sreekumar, Biology & Computer Science, Undergraduate Student	Developing a web server for evidence based variant annotation for cancer.
	William Suh, PreMed, Undergraduate Student	Network biology and complex diseases. Focused in Pediatric Acute Lymphoid Leukemia.
	Andy Yang, Chemical Biology, Undergraduate Student	Tool development, variant data visualization. Focused in integration of evidence based data.
	Amelia Zug, Computational Biology, Undergraduate Student	Bioinformatics applications in cancer biology, focused in ovarian cancer.

Alumni

• Finán Gammell, High School Student, Summer 2023
• Caden Chou, Undergraduate Student, Computer Science, Spring-Summer 2023
• Charissa Chou, Research Assistant 2022-2023, Undergraduate Student 2020-2022
• Orion Bloomfield, Research Assistant, Undergraduate Student, Spring 2022
• Kazen Gallman, Research Assistant,Undergraduate Student, Fall 2021-Spring 2022
• George Tollefson, BS Clinical Research Assistant, 2017-2021
• Alexander Lee, Undergraduate Student, Summer 2020
• Elizabeth Woo, Undergraduate Student, 2019-2020, Computational Biology- Graduated, Honors Thesis
• David Armanious, Undergraduate Student, 2017-2019, Computational Biology- Graduated, Honors Thesis
• Michael Superdock, Medical Student, Summer 2017-2018
• Gensay Sazci, Undergraduate Student, Summer 2017
• Sarah Tran, Undergraduate Student, Summer 2017
• MacKenzie Brigham, 2016 Medical Student, Summer 2016

Collaborators

Ali Amin, MD

Benedito Carneiro, MD

Wen-I Chang, MD

Liang Cheng, MD

Phyllis Dennery, MD

Andre De Souza, MD

Wafik El-Deiry, MD, PhD

Joshua Honeyman, MD

Sorin Istrail, PhD

Sean Lawler, PhD

James Padbury, MD

Jessica Schuster, PhD

Sunil Shaw, PhD

Rob Sobol, PhD

Ece Uzun, PhD

Alphabetical order based on last names