Research

Interdisciplinary Nature Enables Expanded Research Potential

WPI’s Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (BCB) program comprises multiple disciplines, and the research focus areas of our program are similarly varied and diverse. Working in state-of-the-art facilities like WPI’s Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park, our faculty and student researchers make groundbreaking discoveries at the intersection of Biology, Mathematics, and Computer Science.

WPI Researcher Shares 3D Roadmap of Coronavirus with Scientists Worldwide

Researchers use Mixed Reality to Visualize Complex Biological Networks

Learn more about our fascinating research efforts and world-class faculty members involved in them:

Faculty Member	Research Focus Areas
Emmanuel O. Agu Website	Computer graphics, mobile computing, wireless networks, smartphones as healthcare delivery platform
Tanja Dominko	Regenerative cell biology, stem cells, nuclear reprogramming, epigenetics, reproductive/developmental biology
Joseph B. Duffy	Cancer biology/signal transduction, cancer therapeutics, cell adhesion mechanisms, neurodegenerative disorders
Mohamed Eltabakh Website	Database management systems, information management
Lane Taylor Harrison Website	Information visualization, visual analytics, human-computer interactions
Xiangnan Kong Website	Data mining, social networks, machine learning, big data analytics, connectome
Dmitry Korkin Website	Bioinformatics of disease, big data in biomedicine, computational genomics, systems biology, data mining, machine learning
Amity Manning	Cancer cell biology, cell cycle regulation, mitotic progression and chromosome segregation, chromatin regulation, genome stability
William J. Martin Website	Algebraic combinatorics, applied combinatorics
Sarah D. Olson Website	Mathematical biology, chemical signaling, mechanics, hydrodynamics
Randy Paffenroth Website	Large scale data analytics, statistical machine learning, compressed sensing, network analysis.
Samuel M. Politz	Genetic control of surface glycoprotein expression in C. elegans, chemosensory control of nematode behavior and development, host immune responses to parasitic nematode infections
Reeta Prusty Rao Website	Genomic studies and high throughput screening to understand and manage fungal diseases in humans
Carolina Ruiz Website	Data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, biomedical data mining
Elke Rundensteiner Website	Data and information management, big data analytics, visual data discovery, stream and pattern mining, large scale data infrastructures
Elizabeth F. Ryder	Computational biology, simulation of biological systems, neurobiology
Brigitte Servatius Website	Combinatorics, matroid and graph theory, structural topology, geometry, history and philosophy of mathematics
Scarlet Shell	Bacterial pathogenesis, bacterial stress response, prokaryotic gene regulation, prokaryotic genomics and transcriptomics
Jagan Srinivasan Website	Bacterial pathogenesis, bacterial stress response, prokaryotic gene regulation, prokaryotic genomics and transcriptomics
Dalin Tang Website	Biofluids, biosolids, blood flow, mathematical modeling, numerical methods, scientific computing, nonlinear analysis, computational fluid dynamics
Erkan Tuzel	Statistical mechanics and polymer physics applied to biology and materials science
Luis Vidali Website	Plant cell biology and molecular genetics, live cell microscopy, molecular motors/cytoskeleton
Zheyang Wu Website	Biostatistics, high-dimensional model selection, linear and generalized linear modeling, statistical genetics, bioinformatics
Jian Zou Website	Financial time series, spatial statistics, biosurveillance, high dimensional statistical inference, Bayesian statistics

State-of-the-Art Facilities Enhance Research and Learning

BCB faculty and students benefit from access to diverse resources available through participating academic departments, the campus computation center, and the research laboratories at Gateway Park, as well as University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Grid and cloud computing, along with high-speed networking, provide substantial computational infrastructure. Students and researchers can tap into most major biological databases, and a wide range of bioinformatics software packages are installed and maintained. Wet labs at the Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park and University of Massachusetts Medical School are also available for use.

Research

Interdisciplinary Nature Enables Expanded Research Potential

Research Area Focus

WPI Researcher Shares 3D Roadmap of Coronavirus with Scientists Worldwide

Researchers use Mixed Reality to Visualize Complex Biological Networks

State-of-the-Art Facilities Enhance Research and Learning