SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Professor Terry Speed
Senior Principal Research Scientist, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Terry Speed is trained in mathematics and statistics and has had a lifelong interest in genetics. After teaching mathematics and statistics in universities in Australia and the UK, and working in the CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics, he went to Berkeley 21 years ago. Since that time, his research and teaching interests have concerned the application of statistics to genetics and molecular biology. Within the field of bioinformatics, his interests are broad, including biomolecular sequence analysis, the mapping of genes in experimental animals and humans, and functional genomics. He has been particularly involved in the low level analysis of microarray data. Eleven years ago he took the job at the Walter and Eliza Hall, and now spends half of his time there and half in Berkeley.

Biotechnology-driven statistics

In the last few decades, there has been an explosive growth in the amount of biological data generated by the scientific community. Now familiar examples include whole genome sequences for a rapidly growing number of species, but there are also very large collections of experimental data on a wide variety of cells, tissues, organisms and environments. The data are generated using a small but expanding range of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA microarrays, antibody assays, and mass spectrometry, each of which comes in many forms. This deluge in data acquisition has stimulated the rapid development of methods for storing, organising, retrieving, viewing and analysing the data. Statistics has played a key role in this new, data-rich biology, and in this presentation, I'll touch on some of the problems with which statisticians have had to deal. In the process I will highlight the impact this has had on the discipline of statistics, and the challenges lying ahead.