RICKY CHAN, PH.D.

Director of the Computational Biology Core

E. Ricky Chan, Ph.D. is a Research Sci­en­tist and Direc­tor of the Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy Core.  His focus for the core is to pro­vide a gate­way for labs seek­ing assis­tance in the field of bioin­for­mat­ics and com­pu­ta­tional analy­sis.  This need has grown tremen­dously as addi­tional research projects are lever­ag­ing the use of next-generation sequenc­ing meth­ods but lack the com­pu­ta­tional exper­tise to han­dle large datasets.  Dr. Chan received his Ph.D. from Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­sity under the men­tor­ship of Dr. Mark Adams, map­ping ENU-induced muta­tions in mouse mod­els of blood dis­or­ders, uncov­er­ing a reces­sive muta­tion in the TPO recep­tor that leads to throm­bo­cy­tope­nia with over-dominance.  He con­tin­ued his train­ing as a post-doctoral fel­low with Dr. David Serre at the Cleve­land Clinic where his focus was on the genomic char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the malar­ial par­a­site Plas­mod­ium vivax, reveal­ing a com­mon dupli­ca­tion of the Duffy bind­ing pro­tein in Mala­gasy indi­vid­u­als which may be involved in the uncanny obser­va­tion of P. vivax infect­ing Duffy neg­a­tive indi­vid­u­als in that region.  Dur­ing his post-doc train­ing Dr. Chan also devel­oped and imple­mented a novel method and pipeline for the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of micro­biome data using 16s sequenc­ing in sev­eral dis­ease mod­els and stud­ies includ­ing colon can­cer, meta­bolic uptake, and restora­tion of col­o­niza­tion resis­tance of noso­co­mial pathogens after antimi­cro­bial treat­ment.  From these highly col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ences Dr. Chan has become an expert in the pro­cess­ing and analy­sis of next-generation sequenc­ing data.  As the direc­tor of the Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy core he con­tin­ues to develop and test new genomic and com­pu­ta­tional tools to assist in var­i­ous research stud­ies includ­ing but not lim­ited to infec­tious dis­ease, can­cer, metab­o­lism, and the micro­biome.  Please con­tact Dr. Chan if you have a project requir­ing ana­lyt­i­cal assis­tance with next-generation sequenc­ing data includ­ing whole genome or exome sequenc­ing, RNA-Seq, locus-specific sequenc­ing, SNP and vari­ant detec­tion and com­par­a­tive genomics.