Dr. Ker-Chau Li to Present the 2010 Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture
04-01-2010
Dr. Ker-Chau Li is the invited speaker for the Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture which will be held on Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 4:30 pm in MATH 175. The title of the talk will be "Exploring complex interactions in genomic data for aiding the translational medicine research." A reception will follow the seminar at 6:00pm.
Li is a Distinguished Professor of Statistics and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. His research interests include bioinformatics, systems biology, lung cancer studies, high dimensional data analysis, large ensembles of time series, medical image analysis, machine learning, statistical graphics, Bayesian computation, regression, censoring, experimental design, and survey sampling. He is best known for introducing sliced inverse regression (SIR) and principal Hessian direction (PHD), two fundamental dimension reduction methods for high dimensional data analysis. Beginning in 2000, his research interest turned to the emerging field of computation/mathematics/statistics in genome biology. In 2002, he published a paper in Proceedings of Academy of Science, featuring the novel method of liquid association (LA) for microarray gene expression analysis. He is currently leading a research group from UCLA and Academia Sinica to continue the development of methods for utilizing multiple sources of gene expression profiling, genetic markers, complex disease phenotypes and traits. A website formerly found at http://kiefer.stat2.sinica.edu.tw/LAP3 offered on-line computation based on LA and related methods for gene expression studies. He is also collaborating with Dr. Pan Chyr Yang of National Taiwan University and his colleagues on integrative cancer biology.
Li received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Purdue between 1981 and 1984 before becoming a faculty member at UCLA. He has served as an Associate editor and Co-Editor of Statistica Sinica and an Associate Editor for the Annals of Statistics and Computational Statistics. In 2003, Li was the Medallion Lecturer at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) meeting. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Statistics in 1993 and in 1989 he became an Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellow.
The Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture is named in memory of Myra Samuels who was Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in Purdue's Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and Associate Director of Statistical Consulting in the Department of Statistics.