Marquette University computer science professor Serdar Bozdag was awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for his precision medicine research.
Bozdag, an assistant professor of computer science in the university’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, is focused on developing methods for analyzing existing biological and clinical datasets to predict disease-associated genes and patient-specific drug responses.
“Computational methods that perform secondary analysis of publicly available datasets can pave the road towards precision medicine,” Bozdag said. “The goal is to develop a model that will enable more effective treatments to patients and reduce health care costs. We aim to extend our recent and ongoing work to find context-specific regulatory interactions and modules, and to predict disease associated genes and patient-specific drug response.”
The NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award is spread out over five years. The award provides support for the research in an investigator’s laboratory that falls within the mission of the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences, with the goal of providing investigators with greater stability and flexibility, enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs.
“The important work Dr. Bozdag and his lab have done to this point is exciting,” said Iqbal Ahamed, chair and professor of computer science at Marquette. “While this award certainly shines a light on the great advances coming out of Marquette, it will also go a long way in aiding his lab in its goal of providing a method to develop more precise and effective medical treatments.”
