Jennifer Chang presented her research at a BCB Seminar on June 26, 2017 entitled, "Developing an integrated system for biological network exploration".  Jennifer's home department is Genetics, Development and Cell Biology (GDCB) and her Major Professors are Patrick Schnable, Agronomy and Basil Nikolau, BBMB.

Here is an abstract of her presentation:

Network analysis and visualization have been used in systems biology to extract biological insight from complex datasets. Many existing network analysis tools either focus on visualization but have limited scalability, or focus on analysis with limited visualizations. The separation of analysis from visualizing the analysis results causes systems biologists to jump between forming a question, building a massive network, identifying a subnetwork for visualization, and using the visualization as feedback and inspiration for the next question. This iterative process can take several days, making it difficult for researchers to maintain the mental map of the questions queried. In addition, biological data is stored in different formats and has annotations, thus systems biologists often run into hurdles when merging large or heterogeneous networks. The polymorphic nature of the datasets makes it difficult for researchers to integrate data to answer biological questions.  A more systematic method for merging data, resolving data conflict, and analyzing subnetworks may improve the efficiency and scalability of heterogeneous multi-network analysis.