Congratulations to Mark for defending his PhD thesis, entitled “Advancing Causal Machine Learning for Metabolomic Biomarker Discovery and Cross-Species Gene Regulation”. Mark has done a great job in two fronts. First, he developed a new algorithm (MORALE) that uses cross-species comparisons to predict the transcription factor binding potential of a given DNA region. MORALE is a collaborative project with Drs Kostka and Chikina. Second, he led the analysis of metabolomics data from a Japanese cohort, to identify features that are linked to cardiovascular outcomes. Japanese people have much lower incidence of cardiovascular outcomes than the US people, so this research is expected to be very important.
Congratulations, Mark!
Photo: Mark with Minxue (Benos’ Lab alumnus) right after the defense.