Event

Join the Department of Preclinical Sciences for a research seminar by guest lecturer Professor Giri Narasimhan of the Florida International University on, The Social Network of Microbes on Wednesday, December 7, from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://sta-uwi-edu.zoom.us/j/93183588904?pwd=a1UxT2pERTBsZVJnL0tIMk43WElDdz09

Meeting ID: 931 8358 8904 Passcode: 170713

Abstract

Microbial communities or Microbiomes are ubiquitous and diverse. They live in specialized niches in the bodies of humans and animals and out in the environment. Microbiomes display a complex set of beneficial and harmful interactions within the community and their environment, not unlike the characteristics of a human “social network.” More importantly, while our genomes are essentially static during our lifetimes, our microbiomes are constantly changing. Microbiomes can be studied using next generation sequencing technologies. Analysis of the sequence data requires computational pipelines, which can help understand the composition of microbiomes and their diversity. The analysis can also help in identifying differentially abundant microbial taxa between two or more cohorts. However, a rich menu of options is possible for further analysis. This talk will discuss how computational methods can help understand complex relationships within the community and even infer causal relationships and understand dysbiosis. We will also discuss the validation of some of the interactions in the laboratory.

Bio

Giri Narasimhan is a professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at FIU, where he heads the Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG). He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Algorithms, and Theoretical Computer Science, and Statistics. His research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, NIJ, DoD, FDOH, USDA, and private industry. He was the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering and Computing from 2009-15. He has also received FIU Top Scholar Award for Excellence in Research and the FIU Senate Distinguished Faculty award for mentoring and advising. More details are at https://users.cs.fiu.edu/~giri/ and http://biorg.cs.fiu.edu/.