Alumni Lecture: Professor Raymond Ng - Medicine Meets Computer Science: Biomarker Development for Chronic Disease Management

Date

This lecture is part of the educational events offered during UBC Alumni Weekend.  Visit here for full schedule of all Alumni Weekend events.

Date: Saturday, May 26

Time: 10:45 - 11:45 am

Location: Dodson Room, Irving K Barber Learning Centre

RSVP: mng@cs.ubc.ca

Speaker: Raymond Ng, Professor, UBC Department of Computer Science; CIO PROOF Centre of Excellence

Title: Medicine Meets Computer Science: Biomarker Development for Chronic Disease Management

Abstract:

Personalized medicine has been hailed as one of the main directions for medical research in this century. In the first half of the talk, we give an overview of our projects that develop genomics and proteomics biomarkers for managing chronic diseases clinically, such as COPD and heart failures. We believe that our approach will provide better patient care but with lower costs. In the second half of the talk, we overview how computer science is critical to personalized medicine. In particular, we describe how computational methods are used to mine large amounts of genomics data to produce biomarkers. We also discuss some of the challenges in analyzing genomics data. We conclude by pointing out the importance of data cleansing and pre-processing for biomarker development.

Bio:
Dr. Raymond Ng obtained his Bachelors degree from UBC Department of Computer Science in 1986. In 1992, he returned to UBC to become a faculty member. His main research area for the past two decades is on data mining, with a specific focus on health informatics and text mining. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications on data clustering, outlier detection, OLAP processing, health informatics and text mining. He is the recipient of two best paper awards - from 2001 ACM SIGKDD conference, which is the premier data mining conference worldwide, and the 2005 ACM SIGMOD conference, which is one of the top database conferences worldwide.

For the past decade, Dr. Ng has co-led several large scale genomic projects, funded by Genome Canada, Genome BC and NSERC. The total amount of funding of those projects well exceeded $40 million Canadian dollars. He now holds the Chief Informatics Officer position of the PROOF Centre of Excellence, which focuses on biomarker development for end-stage organ failures.

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