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Using 3-D chromosomal organization to understand the functions of DNA
Dr. William Noble develops and applies computer algorithms to help biologists make sense out of large collections of molecular biology data. Dr William Noble, Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington is conducting his research in many collaborative ways. His lab acts as the glue between theoreticians and applied scientists. As such, Noble's role is often to identify problems in one domain that can be solved by solutions from another domain. Essentially, all of the lab's projects involve multiple labs working together.
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Primary methods of research include the field of machine learning, in which patterns identified in one set of data are used to identify similar patterns in other, novel data sets.
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Several current projects in the lab focus on inferring the 3D structure of DNA in the nucleus of the cell, and understanding how that structure relates to functional processes like gene expression.
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In collaboration with experimental biologists, Dr. Noble has characterized the three-dimensional structure of the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite responsible for the most lethal form of malaria. The group is investigating how that structure affects gene expression in the parasite.
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They are currently researching methods for understanding the function of different regions of the human genome by integrating massive and heterogeneous collections of DNA sequencing data. Dr. Noble and his team are developing methods for identifying the protein sequences responsible for generating observed spectra in proteomics mass spectrometry experiments.
Dr. William Noble and his lab benefit society by developing and providing software tools that facilitate scientific discovery. Dr. William Noble's research focus entails new machine learning and statistical methods as well as important scientific insights in genomics and proteomics. External funding would allow Dr. William Noble to transform many groundbreaking ideas from prototype computer code into robust, hardened software that can be used by scientists around the world. In particular, his lab has a great suite of software tools for proteomics which could be beneficial to many scientists. With extra resources Dr. William Noble will be able to make the tools more user friendly, robust and efficient, as well as provide resources to incorporate into the software some of the lab's most recently developed algorithms.
Bio
William Stafford Noble graduated from Stanford University in 1991 with a degree in Symbolic Systems. Between undergraduate and graduate school, he worked in the speech group at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and at Entropic Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California From 1991 to 1993, he also spent two years teaching high school math, physics and English literature with the US Peace Corps in Lesotho, Africa. Dr. William Noble received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Charles Elkan. He spent the next year as a Sloan/DOE Postdoctoral Fellow with David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
From 1999 to 2002, William Noble served as faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. In 2002, he joined the faculty of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, where he has adjunct appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and in the Department of Medicine.
His research group develops and applies statistical and machine learning techniques for modeling and understanding biological processes at the molecular level. Noble is the recipient of an NSF Career award and is a Sloan Research Fellow.
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