The Herbert and Florence Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics will continue its seminar series on the topic of mathematical sciences underpinning cancer research. The monthly seminars take place on the second Wednesday of the month, 2:00-3:00 PM EST. The presentations are open to the Columbia community (in person and online) and to researchers outside Columbia (via Zoom).
On Wednesday, May 13th (2:00 PM ET), IICD welcomes Dr. Mona Singh from Princeton University. Seminar hosted by Dr. Sanket Rane. The seminar will take place in person in Schermerhorn Hall 603 (Morningside Heights campus). If you wish to attend the seminar remotely, please register using the following link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/C1HyFH4YR4aZiC7usFGnVA
Title: Computational Methods for Interpreting Cancer Genomes
Abstract: Cancer genomes accumulate diverse somatic alterations whose functional consequences range from rewiring gene expression and reshaping cellular dependencies to modulating immune recognition. In this talk, I will present computational approaches we have been developing for systematically uncovering these effects. First, I will describe an integrative framework that leverages multi-omic tumor data to identify genes that are transcriptionally dysregulated due to driver gene mutation and to prioritize which of these are candidate therapeutic targets. Applied across cancer types, this approach reveals widespread driver–target relationships and highlights genes whose inhibition may enhance treatment response. Second, I will discuss an approach for jointly modeling the association between multiple genomic alterations and pathway-level gene expression, enabling the identification of pathway-level dysregulation. Finally, I will focus on identify immune-relevant alterations, highlighting how disparities in available data impact the prediction of interactions between cancer-derived peptides and the immune system, and discussing strategies to address these gaps.
Bio: Mona Singh is the Wang Family Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University, where she is jointly appointed in the Computer Science department and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Mona obtained her AB and SM degrees at Harvard University, and her PhD at MIT, all three in Computer Science. She did postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She is a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the American Institute for the Medical and Biological Engineering. She is currently Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Computational Biology. She has been program committee chair for several major computational biology conferences, including ISMB (2010), WABI (2010), ACM-BCB (2012), and RECOMB (2016). She has been Chair of the NIH Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems Study Section (2012-2014), and a council member of the Computing Community Consortium (2021-2024), and is currently on the steering committee for WABI.
If you would like to meet one-on-one (possibly via Zoom) or attend the lunch or dinner with the speaker, please contact the event organizer.
