Abstract for Dr. Dowell's talk:
The goal of personalized medicine is to tailor medical care to the individual as a means of drastically improving health. With the falling cost of DNA sequencing, genomics has become a vital aspect of the future of personalized medicine. In this talk I will discuss the current state of personalized genomics as well as the challenges and perspectives for it in the next decade. I will also briefly discuss my laboratory's recent work on the genomics of Down syndrome as a case study into the trials and tribulations of research in the field.
Brief biography:
Robin Dowell is an Assistant Professor in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department and a member of the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado. She is a Boettcher Investigator and Sloan Fellow. Her primary expertise is in computational biology, specifically using machine learning techniques to better understand genomics. Her laboratory studies both the evolution of transcriptional regulation and how variation within a species contributes to phenotypic differences, a key aspect of personalized medicine. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Colorado, she worked as a postdoc at MIT and completed her graduate work at Washington University in St Louis.
