Runpu Chen

The major goal of my research is to reveal the mechanisms of cancer initialization and development. For this aim, I use advanced computational algorithms to deeply analyze into multi-omics cancer genetic data.

Cancers initialize and develop by accumulating random mutations, and such mutations cause huge amount of variations in molecular characteristics of cancer cells. Thus, it makes cancer a dynamic and heterogeneous process whose mechanism is hidden in the ultra-high dimensional multi-omics genetic data. To fully analyze such data, I design machine learning tools to find clinically-relevant genes, reduce the dimensionality of data, identify homogeneous patient groups by clustering, discover the progression patterns of cancers, and develop prognostic models that are useful in clinical applications.

My former research mainly focuses on breast cancer, and I will extend my research into other cancer types like bladder, colon and lung cancers. The results of these researches will facilitate clinical applications including individualized treatment, drug design, patient risk evaluation and prediction, etc.

• Yijun Sun, PhD

• PhD, University at Buffalo, Computer Science Department (2020)