Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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middleware

Refining tools for Big Data

You may have been hearing about the advent of Big Data: truckloads of information coming from cell phones, satellites, microscopes, and perhaps someday, wearable health monitoring devices.

At Emory, specialists in biomedical informatics have been in the forefront of efforts to design software that will allow scientists to learn from these mountains of data. Fusheng Wang was recently named as co-PI on a five-year $5 million National Science Foundation grant to create MIDAS (Middleware for Data-Intensive Analytics and Science), part of the NSF’s Data Infrastructure Building Blocks program. For this grant, the team consists of seven institutions: Indiana University (lead — Geoffrey Fox), Arizona State, Emory, Kansas, Rutgers, Utah and Virginia Tech.

Wang also recently received a NSF Career award in this same area.

The MIDAS project addresses major data challenges in seven different communities: biomolecular simulations, network and computational social science, epidemiology, computer vision, spatial geographical information systems, remote sensing for polar science, and pathology informatics. Wang is responsible for pathology informatics and geospatial, gathering requirements from those communities and implementing the spatial query and parts of the image analysis library. The libraries are supposed to be interoperable across a range of computing systems including clouds, clusters and supercomputers. The project includes a plan to develop a open online course (MOOC), according to the NSF.

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment