Wei Sun, PhD

Assistant Professor

Research Interests

Key words: eQTL studies, tiling array data analysis, statistical genetics, dimension reduction, multiple testing.

With the advance of microarray technique and the accumulation of DNA sequence information, the study of living organism in system level has become more and more popular. The data may include genome-wide DNA polymorphism information (e.g., genotype of thousands to millions of SNPs, DNA copy number variations), epigenetic information (e.g., nucleosome occupancy, histone modification), genome-wide gene expression data, protein interaction data, as well as phenotype data. How to handle and analyze such comprehensive data is the general interest of my research. Currently, I focus on the following specific topics:

1. The signal propagation from DNA polymorphism to gene expression. We combine the DNA polymorphism data, gene expression data, and transcription regulation data to reveal the possible roles of transcription factors in gene expression linkage. (Sun et al., 2007, bioinformatics).

2. The statistical methods to analyze tiling array data. We have developed a method based on segmental semi-Markov model to detect nucleosome free regions. (Sun et al., 2007, submitted). We are working to extend this method, or modification of this method to other tilling array data.

3. Dynamic linkage of complex traits, which can be clinical traits, e.g., body fat, or gene expression traits. We employ Liquid Association method (Li, PNAS, 2002) to identify the dynamic correlation between two complex traits (Sun et al., 2007, submitted) or between one complex trait and DNA polymorphism (Sun et al., 2007, manuscript in preparation).

4. The relation between phenotype and gene expression. The phenotype can be tumor labels (Sun et al., 2007, manuscript in preparation), or survival time with censored data (Wu et al., 2007, manuscript in preparation).

5. Large scale association studies with thousands to millions of SNPs and/or thousands of complex traits. We focus on the statistical challenges of dimension reduction and false discovery rates evaluation.

Publications (via PubMed)

Contact Information

3104E McGavran-Greenberg Hall, CB 7420
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7420

Phone: (919) 966-7266
Email: Wei Sun, Ph.D.

www.bios.unc.edu/~wsun