We are interested in multidisciplinary life sciences research. The ultimate goal of our research is to integrate experimental and computational approaches for better understanding of living systems. Our bioanalytical research exploits practical and efficient high-throughput technologies for the analyses of complex mixtures derived from living systems. This will facilitate the development of preventive, predictive and personalized medicine for specific diseases and will promote health and wellness. We use a number of high-throughput analytical platforms including multidimensional liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (MDLC-MS) for proteomics, and for metabolomics; liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), and comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCxGC/TOF-MS). Each type of analysis affords limited analyte coverage of molecules present in a patient sample and therefore provides only a partial molecular profile for an individual patient. These diverse analytical data must be integrated with advanced bioinformatics methods for accurate evaluation of health and detection of disease susceptibility.

Our long term goal for bioinformatics research is to develop a complete system that enables mining of high-throughput data for identification of molecular networks and ‘systems level’ knowledge assembly. An integrated data mining pipeline for metabolomics is one of our projects that provides metabolite identification, quantification, pattern recognition, and description of metabolite networks. We are also developing innovative bioinformatics tools for protein identification, quantification, and verification. Diverse data integration and knowledge assembly is another of our bioinformatics research areas. We are developing informatics tools to integrate scientific information extracted from biological databases by achieving a virtual integration of those databases.

Student training is a core goal in our group. Our philosophy is for everyone in the group to contribute to our overall knowledge and understanding of the biological systems under study. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of our research, we accept that the goals, backgrounds, and interests of students will differ. Depending on the student's interest, s/he can choose to focus on either bioanalytical method development or bioinformatics. However, students are always highly encouraged to interact and collaborate with others within or outside of the group.

Following is a list of our current projects:
     1. Biomarkers for steatohepatitis
     2. Mass informatics of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry
     3. Biomarker discovery and validation in multiple myeloma cells using multiple proteomics platforms
     4. Bioinformatics for metabolite identification, quantification and network analyses