ISMB 2020 - Distinguished Keynote

Laxmi Parida

IBM Fellow, Master Inventor
Computational Genomics
Academy of Technology & Mathematical Sciences Council
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
New York, United States
http://researcher.ibm.com/person/us-parida

Introduced by: David Sankoff, Honorary Conference Chair
Time: Thursday, July 16, 9:30 am - 10:30 am (Eastern Daylight Time)
Presentation Title: Combinatorics, Statistics and Topology enabling Genomics

Abstract

The influence of computing disciplines on biology needs no reiteration. I will talk about questions in genomics where a confluence of methods has helped in answering interesting aspects of the problem. For example, random graphs and statistics in intra-species history reconstruction, topology and statistical learning in disease genomics and metagenomics.

Biography:

Dr. Laxmi Parida is an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor and heads the Computational Genomics at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA. She is a visiting professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. Over the last 10 years, she has led the IBM Science team in the Cacao Consortium (with MARS, USDA), the Genographic Project with National Geographic, the Bioinformatics team in the "Sequence the Food Supply Chain Consortium" across multiple IBM labs in different geographies, and the science team in the personalized cancer medicine system “Watson for Genomics”.

Her research areas include population genomics, cancer genomics, plant genomics, bioinformatics, algorithms (including AI) and topological data analysis. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed research papers; edited 10 volumes and authored a monograph on pattern discovery in bioinformatics. She holds over 40 US patents. She is on the advisory board of NYU Engineering School and editorial board of BMC Bioinformatics, Journal of Computational Biology and an Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics.

In her spare time she authors a blog and a book on food, and, is a teacher and performer of Argentine Tango.