Eddy Receives 2008 BMES Graduate Research Award

8/7/2008 Sam Smucker

James Eddy, Ph.D. student in Bioengineering, has won a 2008 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Graduate Research Award.

Written by Sam Smucker

James Eddy
James Eddy
James Eddy
James Eddy, Ph.D. student in Bioengineering, has won a 2008 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Graduate Research Award for his abstract entitled, “Pathway Expression Rank Analysis (p-XRAY): a Novel Tool for Gene Set Expression Analysis.” The abstract was submitted for the BMES Annual Meeting and his award is one of only eight awarded nationally.

Eddy developed a computational program to analyze relative expression levels of genes within biological pathways. By studying how these levels, or ranks, fluctuate from person to person, one can learn how strongly or weakly a pathway is regulated in a particular phenotype (e.g. healthy or diseased). The method also identifies pathways where gene ordering is significantly shuffled between two phenotypes -- providing hypotheses for the underlying molecular mechanisms, as well as the means for a fairly robust classification procedure.

Eddy works in the lab of Dr. Nathan Price of the Department of Chemical Engineering. He will present the abstract at the BMES meeting in St. Louis in October. The award includes a certificate, a stipend, and travel expenses for the conference.


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This story was published August 7, 2008.