Dr. Yijun Ruan is Associate Director for Genomics Technology at the Genome Institute of Singapore. His primary interest is to develop novel genomics technologies and bioinformatics solutions to address fundamental biological questions in cancer biology and stem cell biology. He invented the Paired End Tag (PET) sequencing approaches (GIS-PET) for transcriptome characterization and (ChIP-PET) for analysis of genome-wide transcription regulatory elements. He is currently developing ultra high throughput DNA sequencing strategies to study higher order mechanisms involved in transcription regulatory and chromosome structural organization, as well as to sequence individual human cancer genomes for structural and nucleotide polymorphisms. He obtained his PhD in molecular biology from University of Maryland in 1994. After that he went to Monsanto to study plant gene expression and regulation, and as one of the key scientists helped to initiate the field of plant genomics in late 90s. Since 2002, he has moved to Singapore to start the institute's genomics technology program, and published his research results in the areas of genome technology, cancer, and stem cells biology in top journals including Nature, Science, Cell, PLoS Biology and PNAS.

Tentative Title

Bioinformatics challenges in ultra high throughput paired end tag (PET) DNA sequencing to interrogate high-order structure of human genomes