Daniel Newburger
Biomedical Informatics
Bio-X SIGF Fellow 2011/2012
Morgridge Family Fellow
Profs. Serafim Batzoglou (Computer Science) and Hanlee Ji (Oncology)

Each year more than three hundred thousand people develop colorectal cancer (CRC) due to inherited genetic risk factors. Identifying the germline muta-tions responsible for CRC susceptibility in affected families dramatically improves preventative care and clinical outcome, but the vast majority of these muta-tions remain uncharacterized. In order to identify these unknown mutations, Daniel will help develop machine learning algorithms for evaluating genomic data from high-throughput DNA sequencing technol-ogies. They hope this work will provide genetic find-ings that immediately inform clinical intervention and that it will illuminate new aspects of CRC pathogenesis.