Using data science to understand the molecular underpinnings of lung cancer

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Agenda:

6:30 PM: Gather at the Undercroft in Ybor for networking and light refreshments (courtesy of Sharp Decisions and Ashley Putnam). Door may be locked but we'll keep an eye on it.

7:00 PM: Call to order, announcements and introductions.

7:15 PM: Guest Speaker, Paul Stewart

< 8:30: adjourn to an Ybor Bar a couple of blocks away.

If you're a business type, don't let the topic dissuade you from attending. I asked Paul if he would give our group a talk after I saw his presentation to the R Users group. You may find many of his techniques familiar and his data visualizations spectacular. He promised to keep the biology lingo at an elementary level so everyone should be able to follow his discussion.

PLUS: R! People often ask for talks on R so here we go.

From Paul:
Lung cancer causes the most cancer-related deaths in the United States. Although new drug treatments for cancer have emerged through better understanding of the molecular mechanisms of tumor formation and progression, little progress has been made with therapies for patients with squamous cell lung cancer. Here, I present a bioinformatics-based characterization of 108 squamous cell lung cancer tumors from patients seen at the Moffitt Cancer Center. Bioinformatics is the field best thought of as "biological data science". Even though tumors may be no more than a few centimeters large, they contain gigabytes to terabytes worth of data that needs to be stored, processed, and analyzed. I will discuss some of the considerations for practicing biological data science, my findings from characterizing 108 tumors, and some publication quality figures I generated using the base R plotting functions.

Dr. Stewart is a bioinformatics staff scientist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. His research focus is analyzing large molecular datasets to aid in the development of novel cancer treatments and early detection biomarkers. Dr. Stewart’s research has been featured at national meetings, and he has published over a dozen peer reviewed manuscripts in leading journals such as Nature Communications. He received a bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics and a doctorate in chemistry from Florida State University. Dr. Stewart completed three years of training as a postdoctoral fellow at Moffitt before accepting a full time position.