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Computational Toxicology Rotational Fellow Selected
NCCT is pleased to announce that Ms. Beena Vallanat from the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL) has been selected as our first Computational Toxicology Rotational Fellow. This Fellowship program is intended to help translate the technologies and approaches being developed within the NCCT to other parts of the Agency. Beena began her four-month fellowship on September 15, 2008 and is working primarily with NCCT's Dr. Imran Shah. Her goals are to gain a greater understanding of computational approaches for integrating disparate data streams for elucidating toxicologic process in risk assessment. Specifically, she plans to work on analyzing published DEHP time course gene expression data in mice to computationally infer transcriptional networks linked to cell proliferation, a key event in non-genotoxic hepatocarcinogenesis. The concordance of the regulatory network models will be evaluated using archived data sets, and through experimental validation of predicted transcription factors and microRNA. This project is expected to provide useful information about key genetic-regulatory events following DEHP exposure that precede cell proliferation and provide a novel strategy to analyze expression profiles for risk assessment.
This is a great opportunity for interaction, collaboration and facilitation of the work being conducted by NHEERL's Toxicogenomics Core and the NCCT Virtual Liver project. We welcome Beena to NCCT and look forward to a productive collaboration.