Merle (menachem) Fromer, PhD
About Me
Menachem Fromer is a computational biologist, computer scientist, and geneticist investigating the genetic causes of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder. His previous work has yielded efficient algorithms for processing large datasets of protein sequences and clustering them into functional groups and families, accurate algorithms for modeling protein structures and protein-protein interactions at the atomic level, and general-purpose algorithms for finding multiple optimal solutions for widely-used mathematical models.
Language
English
Position
ADJUNCT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR | Psychiatry
Research Topics
Bioinformatics, Gene Discovery, Gene Expressions, Genetics, Genomics
Multi-Disciplinary Training Areas
Cancer Biology [CAB], Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutics (DMT), Neuroscience [NEU]
Research
The current focus of Menachem’s research is in developing computational tools to analyze (exome) sequencing data of large samples of thousands of schizophrenia patients in order to uncover genetic variation, in particular structural variation. His main projects include detecting copy number variation (XHMM software) from exome resequecing data, in addition to sequencing-based phasing of haplotype information. Furthermore, he is studying schizophrenia trios (proband and parents) that are being exome sequenced to discover de novo coding mutations ranging from single-nucleotide variants, insertions/deletions, and copy number variation. He is also collaborating with a number of researchers on developing novel tools for integrating genetic findings into known biological pathways and other functional data, for example, protein-protein interaction networks and protein family and domain information.