Roberta DeVito, Ph.D. Brown University Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Data Science, receives a Brown University COBRE Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease award from their NIGMS/NIH funded Center Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Institutional Development Award (IDeA) grant. Zhijin (Jean) Wu, Ph.D. Brown University  Professor of Biostatistics and Wafik El-Deiry, M.D. Ph.D, FACP Brown UniversityMencoff Family University Professor of Medical Science, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine will serve as the project's mentor and collaborator.

The award is titled,  “Recovering reproducible and local signal in genomic data". The goal of this award is to develop global and local-specific signal across multiple cancer studies and multiple tissues. One of the most important challenges in biological science today is to elucidate the extent to which complex experiments, which measure hundreds of thousands of variables, can be analyzed to generate consistent and global signal when repeated, to identify local signal related to tissues, cancer types or population structure. Importantly, we must include the intrinsic diversity of variation across different studies and control for technical confounders as part of this task.