Congratulations 2008-2009 Graduates

Lingling An (August 2008)

Dr. Lingling An performed her Ph.D. research in the area of high-dimensional dynamic cluster analysis under the direction of Professor Rebecca W. Doerge. Dr. An, an active member of the Statistical Bioinformatics Center, participated in a great number of very productive side projects during her time at Purdue University. In particular, Dr. An has worked closely with the members of the National Science Foundation funded "Functional Genomics of Plant Polyploids", as well as the National Institute of Health funded "Molecular Analysis of Synaptic Transmission Mutants". The title of Dr. An’s dissertation is: "Dynamic Clustering of Time Series Gene Expression".

Typically, when gene expression profiles are clustered for the purpose of understanding the functional co-regulation of genes, genes with similar profiles are organized into groups such that each gene can be a member of only one group or cluster. Early on, Lingling realized that genes participate in multiple biological processes and thus it is of interest to cluster genes in a manner that allows genes to belong to multiple clusters.

Visually, genes that participate in multiple clusters may have very different expression patterns. By taking advantage of techniques and theories from signal processing, Dr. An clustered periodic gene expression profiles from a dynamic perspective under the assumption that different biological processes are characterized by different spectral frequencies. Lingling proposed a dynamic clustering method which provides insight into the dynamic associations among time-limited co-expressed genes. The novel contributions of Dr. An’s work in the areas of Statistics and Bioinformatics are two-fold and include the concept of time-varying clusters, as well as an approach to differentiate significant, or biologically meaningful, clusters from noisy clusters.

After graduation, Dr. An relocated with her husband James, three children (Richard, Annie and David) and dog (Dobbie) to Tucson, Arizona where she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, University of Arizona.

Past graduates can be seen here.