
- This event has passed.
Canceled: Faculty Candidate Talk: David van Dijk, PhD
March 26, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Please Note: This Talk Has Been Canceled
Speaker: David van Dijk, PhD
Talk Title: Manifold Learning Uncovers Hidden Structure in Complex Cellular State Space
About the Speaker: David van Dijk received his PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam. He carried out his graduate research on predicting gene expression from DNA sequence at the University of Amsterdam and the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Jaap Kaandorp and Eran Segal. As a postdoc in the Departments of Genetics and Computer Science at Yale University, David develops machine learning tools, using graph signal processing and deep learning, to uncover complex biological signals from high-throughput, high-dimensional biomedical data.
About the Cluster Hire:
UW’s Cluster Hiring Initiative was launched in 1998 as an innovative partnership between the university, state and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). In its first phase, the initiative authorized nearly 50 “clusters” and nearly 150 new faculty through several rounds of hiring. In 2017, phase two of the Cluster Hiring Initiative was authorized with a goal of supporting at least 12 clusters.
A proposal by several Waisman Center investigators for a Functional Genetics/Genomics of Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Diseases cluster at the Waisman Center was selected by the UW-Madison Cluster Hire Initiative.
New faculty hires who are part of the Functional Genetics/Genomics of Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Diseases cluster at the Waisman Center will help develop a pipeline of discovery that begins with patients in the clinics and ends with new approaches for treatments or therapies. This cycle of translational research would start with identifying patient-specific genetic variants, and then continue through experimental studies to confirm whether these variants truly cause disease. Ultimately, new panels for diagnosis and new approaches for treatment may be discovered.