Fostering Collaboration to Accelerate Discoveries

It is a dream job for me to join the New York Genome Center and Columbia University,” said Dr. Ren. “Decoding the human genome and using this knowledge to improve health has been a lifelong pursuit of mine. Bringing the fruits of genomic research into clinical care will require unprecedented collaboration and innovation. I look forward to achieving this goal by leveraging NYGC’s fantastic genomics infrastructure, exceptionally rich talent pool, and close associations with its institutional founding members in New York.”

Bing Ren, PhD Scientific Director & CEO Professor of Genetics and Development, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and Systems Biology, Associate Director in the Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Science (Vagelos Institute) in VP&S, Columbia University

Studying the changes in gene expression we see in each stage of ALS is key to identifying what triggers symptom onset. Our work with Target ALS ensures we maintain productive collaborations with ALS researchers to develop life-changing treatments.”

Read more on NYGC’s work with Target ALS and New York State.

Hemali Phatnani Director, Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease, NYGC Assistant Professor of Neurological Sciences (in Neurology), Columbia University

We’re now entering an era of low-cost DNA sequencing, and in this study, we took advantage of that to apply whole-genome sequencing techniques that in the past would have been considered wildly impractical.”

Dan Landau, MD, PhD Core Faculty Member, NYGC Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology; Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine

The ability to leverage data generated in a different lab and even processed with a different method, to then use it to link individuals in a completely different anonymous dataset, is rather striking and highlights a real privacy issue for single-cell data. We aim for this study to help quantify risks before data release and shape the design of future studies to ensure greater privacy for patients.”

Gamze Gürsoy, PhD Core Faculty Member, NYGC Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University