Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics are sponsored jointly by the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Biological Sciences (BIO) to encourage research and training that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries between them. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients (biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others) who seek to conduct research on biological questions using informatics tools and methods. It is expected that the Fellows trained through these fellowships will play an important role in training the future workforce. Postdoctoral training in informatics will permit junior scientists trained in biology, mathematical, chemical, and physical sciences to play key roles in developing new quantitative tools and methods that will advance informatics in biology and other fields.
The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Transformations for gene-expression microarray data." Statistical analysis of gene-expression microarray data can be greatly simplified by use of data transformations which bring the data more closely in line with the assumptions common to standard statistical techniques. This research develops methods for finding appropriate transformations for microarray data, using maximum-likelihood methods and robust statistical techniques.
