2019 Myrto Lefkopoulou Award & Lecture – 9/19

Dr. Veera Baladandayuthapani, Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Associate Director of the Center for Cancer Biostatistics at University of Michigan, will be the recipient of the 2019 Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lectureship.

He will accept the award and deliver a lecture on:
Thursday, September 19, 2019 
1:00 PM – Lunch & Lecture | FXB G13
4:30 PM – Reception | FXB Atrium

Drugs, Data and Me: Bayesian Integrative Approaches to Enable Precision Medicine

At the heart of Precision Medicine is connecting the right drug/therapy to the right patient. The extensive acquisition of high-throughput molecular and drug profiling data across diverse model systems have made precision medicine efforts a realistic possibility. Modern precision medicine endeavors are at an inflexion point – facing the fundamental challenge of assimilating, organizing, analyzing and interpreting multi-domain data types to make individualized health decisions. Each of these distinct data types provides a different, partly independent but complementary, high-resolution view, of various biological and disease processes. From an analytic viewpoint, modeling and inference in such studies is challenging, not only due to high dimensionality, but also due to presence of structured dependencies (e.g. pathway/regulatory mechanisms, serial and spatial correlations). Integrative analyses of these multi-domain data, combined with patients’ clinical outcomes, can help us quantify and interpret the complex biological processes that characterize a disease, as well as how these processes relate to the eventual progression and development of the disease. This talk will cover probabilistic Bayesian statistical and computational frameworks that acknowledge and exploit these inherent complex structural relationships, for both biomarker discovery, and clinical prediction, to aid evidence-based translational and individualized medicine. The approaches will be illustrated using several case examples in oncology.