Terry Gaasterland is a computational biologist leader of the Laboratory of Computational Genomics at the Scripps Genome Center and Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics at University of California San Diego (UCSD). Her group develops and uses computational methods to analyze genome and transcriptome sequence data and gene expression data to gain biological insights into an organism and make predictions about molecular processes. In this approach integrates three data sources: high throughput genome and transcriptome sequencing and high-throughput peptide mass-spectrometry. Her research interests also center on logic-based methods for answering queries about large bodies of diverse distributed knowledge. She uses semantic information, that is, data about the data, to develop alternative or cooperative, answers to queries. In this way, she has been exploring problems in computational molecular biology using logic programming techniques in general and cooperative answering strategies in particular. In collaboration with genome sequencing groups in Canada, USA and Europe she built the system MAGPIE (Multipurpose Automated Genome Project Investigation Environment) for analyzing DNA sequence data in real-time during and beyond the lifetime of a sequencing project.

Title of talk at SoIBio IC&WMexico 2016: "Genome Variation in Regulatory Regions: Insights into Primary Open Angle Glaucoma"