Our Science – Shankavaram Website

Uma T Shankavaram, Ph.D.

Radiation Oncology Branch Imaging and Molecular Therapeutics Section Staff Scientist National Cancer Institute Building 10-CRC, Room B2-3677 10 Center Drive Bethesda, MD 20892 Phone:   301-451-8972 Fax:   301-480-5439 E-Mail:   uma@mail.nih.gov

Biography

Dr. Uma Shankavaram received her Ph.D in Human Genetics from India. She completed her postdoctoral research training at the Medical University of South Carolina, and National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health. Combining her strong interest in biology, biostatistics, and computer programming, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow in the Genomics and Bioinformatics Group of Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology, National Cancer Institute till 2007 and currently as a Staff Scientist at the Radiation Oncology Branch of National Cancer Institute.

Research

Biology is driven until recently by the study of individual biochemical compounds and genes. However, new technologies allow experimentalists to gather rapidly growing amounts of data at the scale of the entire cell, and a key challenge is now to integrate these data in order to progress towards a systems-level understanding of biological functions.

In this framework, my research interests center around the field of cancer bioinformatics with special focus on radiation response on gene expression, pharmacogenomics and translational medicine. My other research interests are in the development of relational databases for biomedical projects, as well as the use of data mining and machine learning techniques for bioinformatic analyses.

Following are the major topics my research projects:
- Genomic data analysis and integration
- Statistical pathway analysis
- Target gene discovery
- Bioinformatics tool development

This page was last updated on 10/20/2008.