Garrett M. Dancik's Bioinformatics Laboratory

Welcome! This is the lab page for Garrett M. Dancik, PhD, Professor & Chair of Computer Science at Eastern Connecticut State University, and Program Coordinator of the MS in Applied Data Science program at Eastern. This page gives an overview of my teaching and research interests and serves as a portal to various software projects being developed in my lab. If you are looking for current course materials, click here. I also have an official Faculty Page, though this may not be up-to-date.

Teaching

My teaching interests include foundational programming and statistical methods necessary for computer science, bioinformatics and data science. Over the past few years I have taught the courses listed below. Course material is posted on Github and can be accessed by clicking on the links. Some courses may be in progress.

Fundamentals of Computing (CSC 180)
Introduction to Programming & Machine Intelligence (CSC 202)
Computer Science & Programming I (CSC 210)
Advanced Web Development & Web Scraping (CSC 301)
Introduction to Bioinformatics (CSC 314)
Genomic Data Analysis (CSC 315)
Big Data Programming & Management (CSC 343)
Senior Research (CSC 450)

Software

For links to software including shinyGEO and the Bladder Cancer Biomarker Evaluation Tool, see the software page.

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in data science as well as various aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology. My research involves applying statistical, mathematical, and computational models to answer biological questions and gain insight into biological systems. My more recent work has focused on analyzing gene expression data and identifying prognostic tumor biomarkers.

Specific research interests include

the development of tools and models that increase data accessibility and provide data-driven insight into issues that impact CT
the development and application of bioinformatics and computational methods for analyzing large genomic datasets with applications in personalized medicine
the identification of prognostic and predictive biomarkers and driver mutations in cancer
development, validation, and calibration of computational/mathematical models of biological systems
development of educational tools for statistics and bioinformatics

Research opportunities for students

Join the lab! Students with a background in computer science in any programming language that are interested in bioinformatics research or data science are encouraged to contact me. I am currently developing bioinformatics tools to aid in the identification of cancer biomarkers from gene expression data, a text-mining project to organize cancer-related publications, and educational tools to help students learn R programming, data science, and bioinformatics. Please contact me if you are interested in on working on any of these projects.

Publications

Click here for a list of publications (opens in new window).

Reviewer Profile

Click here for my Publons Reviewer Profile (opens in new window).

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