Stat Soc NSW Talk: Statistical issues with quantitative proteomics data

This month’s Stat Soc NSW talk is being given by our own Jean Yang! And it’s here on
campus too.  

Details are below.  

Michael 

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The Statistical Society of Australia Inc., NSW Branch Monthly Meeting for September 

Wednesday, 12 September 2012 

Meeting Room 214/215, Economics and Business building

6.00pm: refreshments 

6.30pm: talk 

7.30pm: dinner with speaker (all welcome to join) 


Dr Jean Yang 

School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney 

Statistical issues with quantitative proteomics data 

Protein quantisation using mass spectrometry is a recent, powerful platform for
determining relative protein levels for thousands of proteins simultaneously.  In recent
years, we have witnessed rapid development in spectrometry technologies; however, the
statistical analysis of raw tandem spectra as well as processed data remains a
challenging task.  In this talk, we will use biological studies to illustrate the
statistical challenges associated with analysing data from such a platform and
approaches for extracting biological patterns and information.  My discussion will focus
on two separate aspects.  The pre-processing component will examine various
preprocessing approaches and describe a new method for enhancing deterministic protein
identification from identified peptide sequences.  The second component will examine
different models for finding differentially expressed proteins and the use of external
information (such as gene set and possibly other data) for better biological
interpretations.  

Biography of Dr Jean Yang 

Dr Yang has a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the
University of Sydney and completed her doctoral studies in the Department of Statistics
at the University of California, Berkeley where she worked under the supervision of
Terry Speed on the design and analysis of microarray experiments.  She relocated back to
Sydney 7 years ago and currently an ARC Future Fellow at the School of Mathematics and
Statistics, University of Sydney.  Her research work has centered on the development of
statistical methodology and the application of statistics to problems in genomics,
proteomics and biomedical research.  In particular, her focus is on developing methods
for integrating expression studies and other biological metadata such as miRNA
expression, sequence information and clinical data.  As a statistician who works in the
bioinformatics area, she enjoys research in a collaborative environment, working closely
with scientific investigators from diverse backgrounds.