Scientists and students share insights at Computational Research Day

Northwestern Now: Summaries

Elizabeth McNally, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Genetic Medicine, delivered the keynote address at Computational Research Day, on human genome sequencing.
Northwestern’s 4th Annual Computational Research Day brought together more than 350 faculty members and students to showcase innovative research projects, share recent insights and tools, and strengthen the computational research community throughout the university.
The event, co-sponsored by Feinberg and hosted by Northwestern Information Technology on the Evanston campus, featured presentations, a poster competition, workshops, software demos and group discussions, all centered on leveraging computational methods to answer complex research questions.
Rex Chisholm, PhD, vice dean of Scientific Affairs and Graduate Education, kicked off the conference with an opening address discussing the Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse, which currently holds more than 40 terabytes of clinical and research data.
“We are in a completely different world today, where instead of paper records, everybody’s health is now captured in an electronic record,” said Chisholm, also the Adam and Richard T. Lind Professor of Medical Genetics. “The ability to put that data together in a single place and start to think about big data approaches to identifying patterns in that collection of data is a major game-changer.”
Chisholm also spoke about the opportunity for merging such health information with data from the NUgene Project, a genomic biobank sponsored by the Center for Genetic Medicine, which has so far sequenced the genomes of more than 1,000 participants. “What we really want to do is combine that 100 terabytes of human sequence data with that 40 terabytes of phenotypic data and do an all-by-all comparison,” Chisholm said. “It’s a classic example of a big data opportunity. And it’s certain that this approach — once we figure out how to do it — is going to completely revolutionize how we think about disease: how we think about treatment of disease, how we diagnose disease, and ...

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