#BlackInCompBio Seminar Series: Cavin Ward-Caviness, Ph.D. & Stephanie Fotsing, Ph.D.

Dr. Cavin Ward-Caviness is a Principal Investigator at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Ward-Caviness uses his background in Computational Biology to lead his lab in the investigation of environmental health effects using big data sources both in terms of molecular data and electronic health records. Dr. Ward-Caviness is the PI of the EPA CARES resource, a large electronic health record resource that has been utilized for multiple environmental health studies to date. Dr. Ward-Caviness also works closely with several cohorts to understand the impacts of air pollution and socioeconomic stressors on DNA methylation, particularly in the context of accelerated aging. His talk is titled Big Data in Environmental Health: How ‘Omics and Medical Records are Shaping the Field.

Dr. Stephanie Fotsing, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Her research aims at understanding the role and influence of genetic variants on phenotypes including gene regulation, diseases and other complex traits. More specifically, she is conducting investigative analysis of multi-omic data including WGS,WES, RNA-seq, as well as 3D genomic data ... in order to identify genetic variants of potential therapeutic significance. She also develops computational pipelines and tools for addressing these questions. Her talk is titled Characterizing expression short tandem repeats across tissues.