Dr. Ermin Ayday is an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. He received his MS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Research interests include big data analytics and statistical inference from big data, privacy-enhancing technologies (including online social networks and genomic privacy), fingerprinting algorithms, and iterative algorithms for trust and reputation management.

Dr. Barnard is the Section Head for two sections, Biostatistics and Statistical Genetics/Bioinformatics, within the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at Cleveland Clinic. Dr. John Barnard's extensive collaborations with physician researchers, translational and basic scientists over the past 15 years have focused on understanding the pathogenesis and etiology of various diseases, including atrial fibrillation (AF), pulmonary vascular disease (PVD), coronary artery disease (CAD) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). In the AF, PVD, CAD and MDS projects, his lab is using an integrated omics approach, including targeted next generation DNA sequencing, whole genome and exome sequencing, mRNA-seq, miRNA-seq, DNA methylation-seq, microarray expression and SNP chips, to elucidate the roles and interconnections of the genome, transcriptome, epigenome, metabolome and diseasome. Their approach takes high-dimensional data from each omic layer and attempts to link them using methods suitable for big data, such as co-expression networks, trans and cis eQTL using machine learning regression, genome-wide allelic expression imbalance analysis and sparse clustering.

Gürkan Bebek, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Medicine (Department of Nutrition and the Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics) and in the Case School of Engineering's Computer and Data Sciences Department. The Bebek lab uses systems biology approaches to discover clinically-relevant cellular and molecular networks underlying cancer risk, initiation, progression and treatment response.

William S. Bush, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and the Associate Director for Computational Genomics for the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology at Case Western Reserve University.  Dr. Bush received his PhD at Vanderbilt University in Human Genetics in 2008 and then continued as a post-doctoral fellow in the Neurogenomics Training Program at Vanderbilt.  Dr. Bush was recently named a Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation Scholar.  As a human geneticist and bioinformatician, Dr. Bush’s research interests include understanding the functional impact of genetic variation, developing statistical and bioinformatics approaches for integrating functional genomics knowledge into genetic analysis, and the use of electronic medical records for translational research.

Mark Cameron, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Population and Quantitatve Health Sciences in CWRU's School of Medicine. He applies genomic technologies and bioinformatic methods to identify biomarkers (immune correlates) of infectious diseases, such as the novel coronavirus, HIV, and chronic inflammatory conditions, such as psoriasis. He and his team have broad computational expertise in analyzing across data types and studies, and focus their work on targets or diagnostics that can be used in specific immunotherapy or vaccine design.

Dr. Cameron also directs the genomics activities of several large cores or consortia, including the CWRU Applied Functional Genomics Core, the Miami Center for AIDS Research (Inter-CFAR) Bioinformatics Core, the CWRU CFAR Systems Biology Core, and the international Early Treated Perinatally Infected individuals: Improving Children’s Lives with an HIV Vaccine (EPIICAL). These collaborative cores allow Dr. Cameron to apply his systems approach and data from gene sequence, to gene transcription, to protein, cellular and antibody function, to find out what goes right or wrong in the immune systems of patients who respond variably to various diseases or treatments. Most recently, Dr. Cameron is part of an international collaboration developing a rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2.

E. Ricky Chan, PhD, is an instructor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and Director of the Bioinformatics Core for the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology.  His focus is to provide a gateway for labs seeking assistance in the field of bioinformatics and computational analysis.  This need has grown tremendously as additional research projects are leveraging the use of next-generation sequencing methods but lack the computational expertise to handle large datasets.  Dr. Chan received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Adams, mapping ENU-induced mutations in mouse models of blood disorders, uncovering a recessive mutation in the TPO receptor that leads to thrombocytopenia with over-dominance.  He continued his training as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. David Serre at the Cleveland Clinic where his focus was on the genomic characterization of the malarial parasite Plasmodium vivax, revealing a common duplication of the Duffy binding protein in Malagasy individuals which may be involved in the uncanny observation of P. vivax infecting Duffy negative individuals in that region.  During his post-doc training Dr. Chan also developed and implemented a novel method and pipeline for the characterization of microbiome data using 16s sequencing in several disease models and studies including colon cancer, metabolic uptake, and restoration of colonization resistance of nosocomial pathogens after antimicrobial treatment.  From these highly collaborative experiences Dr. Chan has become an expert in the processing and analysis of next-generation sequencing data.  As the director of the Computational Biology core he continues to develop and test new genomic and computational tools to assist in various research studies including but not limited to infectious disease, cancer, metabolism, and the microbiome.  Please contact Dr. Chan if you have a project requiring analytical assistance with next-generation sequencing data including whole genome or exome sequencing, RNA-Seq, locus-specific sequencing, SNP and variant detection and comparative genomics.

Dana Crawford, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and Associate Director for Population and Diversity Research in the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology.  Dr. Crawford received her Ph.D. at Emory University in genetics and molecular biology in 2000 and then trained as a post-doctoral fellow as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000-2002) and as a senior fellow at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences (2002-2006).  Prior to her most current position, Dr. Crawford spent eight years as tenure-track faculty in Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics and Investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt University.  As a genetic epidemiologist at CWRU, Dr. Crawford’s broad research interests include applying genetic variation data to large-scale epidemiologic and clinical cohorts to better understand human genotype-phenotype associations with an emphasis on diverse populations.

Hao Harry Feng, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Dr. Feng develops and applies biostatistical and bioinformatics approaches to better understand high-throughput omics data. He utilizes epigenetic data to define biomarkers, predict and classify disease subtypes. His approaches has wide applications in cancers and neurological studies, such as liver cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and PTSD.

Berkley Gryder, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Gryder’s lab uses protein-directed 3D loops (AQuA-HiChIP) as a way to study biomolecular condensates (liquid droplets that envelop enhancers and genes), to build 3D maps of cancer epigenomes, and to understand drugs in light of the 3D genome folding events they induce.

Jonathan Haines, PhD, is a genetic epidemiologist, Mary W. Sheldon M.D. Professor of Genomic Sciences, Chair of Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, and Director of the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology. Dr. Haines has extensive experience in all aspects of genetic epidemiology with a particular focus on data analytics.  He has applied his expertise to numerous neurological and ophthalmological disorders having located and identified over 20 causal and 200 associated loci.  His interests are in adapting and applying statistical computational methods to biomedical big data.

Dr. Sudha K. Iyengar is an internationally recognized genetic epidemiologist focused in the study of the genetics of vision, renal disease, and speech-sound disorder. She currently directs a multifaceted laboratory that bridges both bench and computational research. Her laboratory is responsible for identification of genes for many diseases, including novel genes for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), age-related cataract and Fuchs Endothelial Corneal Dystrophy (FECD).

David Kaelber, MD, PhD, MPH, MS, FAAP, FACP, FACMI is a practicing internist and pediatrician and the first Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Vice-President of Health Informatics of the MetroHealth System, the public healthcare system for Cleveland, which is affiliated with Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine.  He also is a professor of Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with  CWRU's School of Medicine.

Dr. Kaelber is the founding Director of MetroHealth’s Center for Clinical Informatics Research and Education and the Center for Health Informatics and Patient Engagement, as well as founding Fellowship Director of Case Western Reserve University's (MetroHealth) ACGME accredited Clinical Informatics Fellowship. Dr. Kaelber was in the first group of physician informaticists to become board certified in Clinical Informatics in 2013.

His areas of interest and research include personal health records, electronic health records, clinical decision support, health information exchange, telehealth, the teaching of medical informatics to medical students, resident physicians and fellows, using "big data" and electronic health records for chronic disease detection and management, and other areas of clinical informatics, as well as research in med-peds, a combined specialty of internal medicine and pediatrics.

Mehmet Koyutürk, PhD, is the Andrew R. Jennings Professor of Computing Sciences in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences in CWRU’s School of Engineering. His research is on the development of algorithms for large-scale data mining and analysis, with particular emphasis on networks and graph-structured data, applied to biological systems. Dr. Koyutürk's focus is on analyzing biological networks and transforming "omic" data into knowledge in the context of systems biology, with translational applications in cancer, pre-term birth, and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Koyutürk also serves on the steering committee for graduate programs in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics (SYBB), in CWRU’s School of Medicine. Dr. Koyutürk is a Wallace H. Coulter Fellow, a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), from which he received the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biological Society (EMBS) award for technical achievements in computational imaging and digital pathology.

Thomas LaFramboise, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences with the CWRU School of Medicine. He also is a member of the GI Cancer Genetics Program with the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, housed at CWRU. Dr. LaFramboise is focused on developing and applying computational tools to identify molecular variants - both inherited and somatic - that contribute to cancer and related diseases in humans.

His research has centered on the statistical modeling of data from SNP microarrays to detect DNA copy number changes in tumors, and he has written a number of R software packages designed to draw biological inferences from genomic data. His research group is developing and applying methods to mine high-dimensional data sets, with the goal of generating hypotheses regarding gene function in tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis, which are then tested in the laboratory using human cancer cells.

Jing Li, PhD, is the Leonard Case Jr. Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Computer and Data Sciences at CWRU's School of Engineering. He is also a member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Center of Proteomics and Bioinformatics. Dr. Li’s research interests include bioinformatics and computational biology, data science, machine learning, and data mining, with a particular emphasis on the design and application of efficient combinatorial and statistical algorithms to solve challenging biological or data mining problems.

His earlier work mostly focused on computational genomics including genomic variations analysis for the identification of disease genes and integrative omics data analysis for computational drug prediction. More recently, Dr. Li developed novel algorithms for recommender systems that have broad applications in many fields. Dr. Li’s research activities are well documented in more than ninety peer reviewed journals and conference publications in top bioinformatics and data mining venues.

Christopher McFarland, PhD, is an assistant professor in both the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine. McFarland obtained a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University As a postdoctoral scholar he worked with Professors Dmitri Petrov and Monte Winslow at Stanford University to develop a high-throughput technology for studying combinatorial tumor suppressor losses in mice and their effects on clonal cancer evolution. The McFarland Lab studies cancers' evolutionary process by combining theoretical, statistical, and experimental techniques.

John O'Toole, MD, is an adult nephrologist at the Cleveland Clinic and is focused on basic and translational research investigating the molecular genetic mechanisms of chronic kidney disease. He is participating in several NIH-sponsored observational trials characterizing rare and common forms of kidney disease using high-throughput -omics approaches to redefine kidney disease on a molecular level. His laboratory uses molecular biologic approaches and model systems to study the biologic mechanisms underlying genetic variation that has been associated with increased risk for kidney disease.

Goutham Rao, MD, is a Chair of Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, UH Cleveland Medical Center; Division Chief of Family Medicine, UH Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital; Chief Clinician Experience Officer, UH Cleveland Medical Center, and Clinical Professor, CWRU School of Medicine's Center for Community Health Integration. Dr. Rao's areas of expertise are Childhood obesity and Nutrition.

Daniel M. Rotroff, PhD, is an assistant staff member of the Lerner Research Institute with the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Rostroff uses a wide-range of computational and experimental approaches to leverage 'omics' technologies and electronic health records (EHR) to investigate many aspects of precision medicine, such as biomarker or risk allele discovery for drug response and disease outcomes. Dr. Rotroff is a KL2 scholar and has received funding to develop methods that use genomic and clinical data to identify high-risk subtypes within type 2 diabetes. Other funded projects include the interaction of genomic, behavioral, and microbiome factors into a risk model for onset of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and the use of breath-based metabolomics as a screening tool for chronic liver diseases and hepatocellular carcinoma.

Satya S. Sahoo. PhD, serves on the Executive Committee of the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology. Dr. Sahoo is an associate professor and the director of the Biomedical & Health Informatics PhD program in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with CWRU's School of Medicine. His research is focused on developing new data and metadata representation and analysis techniques for biomedical and healthcare research. Dr. Sahoo has led the development of four ontologies in multiple domains, including one for complex neurological disorder, such as epilepsy.

Nicholas K. Schiltz, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, and in the Center for Community Health Integration. His research interests include applied machine learning and data mining, observational studies using real world data (e.g. claims data, electronic health records, and registries), and geriatric and age-friendly care. Dr. Schlitz was a KL2 Scholar (2015-2019) of the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative, Case Western Reserve University.

Fredrick (Fred) Schumacher, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, with CWRU's School of Medicine. He also serves as the chair of the department's graduate program curriculum committee and serves on the department's PhD admissions committee. He also is the co-leader of the Cancer Prevention Control & Population Research Program, at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. As a genetic epidemiologist, Dr. Schumacher’s research interests are in three major areas: deciphering the inherited genetic architecture of complex traits; assessing the shared genetic etiology of complex phenotypes to elucidate the underlying biology; and determining the clinical impact of inherited variation.

His primary research focus is on cancer, particularly prostate cancer. He is an international leader in the study of the role of germline genetics in cancer susceptibility and progression. For more than a decade, he has led large multi-study consortia within and across cancers (i.e. Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium, NCI GAME-ON, etc.). These consortia have enabled the discovery of cancer genetic risk factors, the generalizability of genetic effects among non-European ancestral populations, and the evaluative utility of genetics in cancer risk prediction.

Dr. Sedor is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and Director of the Case Center for the Study of Kidney Biology and Disease at Case Western Reserve University; Professor of Molecular Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine; and Ray W. Gifford, M.D. Endowed Chair in Kidney Research at the Glickman Urology & Kidney Institute.  Dr. Sedor is board certified in internal medicine and nephrology and is a practicing physician scientist as Staff of the Department of Nephrology and Hypertension at Cleveland Clinic.  Dr. Sedor's research interests focus on progressive kidney disease mechanisms, and his research team's goals are to define clinical, cellular, and genetic bases of kidney disease to identify new therapies and diagnostic tests.  Dr. Sedor is a leader and active member of several research consortia, include the Nephrotic Syndrome Study Network (NEPTUNE) and Cure Glomerulonephropathy (CureGN).  Dr. Sedor is also a co-Principal Investigator of the Cleveland ascertainment site for the NIDDK-supported Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP), a national collaborative effort that aims to create a kidney tissue atlas, define disease subgroups, and identify critical cells, pathways, and targets for novel therapies.  Dr. Sedor's current investigator-initiated projects focus on kidney disease attributable to APOL1 renal risk variants, the major genetic contributors to observed racial disparities in chronic kidney disease, and use of electronic health records to identify diabetic patients with renal complications.

Yasir Tarabichi, MD, is a pulmonary, sleep, and critical care physician at MetroHealth Medical Center. He is also an associate professor at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and MetroHealth’s medical director of the Virtual Care Enterprise and director of Clinical Research Informatics. He helps lead the overall design, execution, and dissemination of the efforts and projects related to health informatics at MetroHealth as part of the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) of Northern Ohio.

Satish Viswanath, PhD, is an associate professor in the departments of Biomedical Engineering, of Radiology, and of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering. Dr. Viswanath recently (May 2023) received the Imaging Informatics Innovator Award from the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine.

Dr. Zhang is a computational biologist and bioinformatician whose research interests include: developing genetics and bioinformatics methods that can be applied to advance the understanding of the complex neural processing associated with disorders disease and cancer diseases and to enhance clinical applications of imaging and genomics by assisting in diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic assessments.

Dr. Zhang has ample experience in genetic analyses and computer science with comprehensive training in data mining on large databases, efficient parallel computation, and software package development. He has extensive collaboration with computer scientists, clinicians, and biologists on different biomedical fields, including neuroimaging analysis, WGS/WES mutation/structural variation analysis, virus/bacterial assembly, pathogen analysis, and RNA analysis in Parkinsons, Alzheimer, Bipolar, Head/Neck Cancer, AML, and Neonatal Sepsis diseases.

Xiaofeng Zhu, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with CWRU's School of Medicine. Dr. Zhu has developed many statistical methods in the areas of association analysis, population stratification and admixture mapping, and has had extensive experience in the design and analysis of genetic studies over the past 20 years. He and his colleagues suggested using principal components to summarize the genetic background information provided by a set of independent markers, this information to be used in association mapping for both quantitative and qualitative traits. Together with his colleagues, he performed the first admixture mapping study using microsatellite markers.

His group has developed several novel statistical methods to identify rare variants, contributing to the understanding of phenotypic variations. His group also developed cross-phenotype association (CPASSOC) that can integrate association evidence from summary statistics of multiple traits, either correlated or independent, continuous or binary, coming from the same or different studies. He leads the Continental Origins and Genetic Epidemiology Network (COGENT) consortium, and has identified multiple loci associated with blood pressure traits in African-Ancestry population. He and his colleagues have also identified many genetic loci associated with sleep disorders.