Hyunsoo Kim

Dr. Hyunsoo Kim

PhD University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Postdoctoral Fellow (2007-2009)
Assistant Professor, University of Alabama Birmingham
Hyunsoo Kim
Dr. Hyunsoo Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Informatics who arrived at UAB in November 2011 when the division was just implementing an informatics-driven personalized medicine component in the Department of Pathology. He is a bioinformatician and a computational biologist who is interested in developing methodologies and algorithms for finding new biological facts, and analyzing genomics data for helping biomedical research.

He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2004 and postdoctoral training at Georgia Tech. in Atlanta and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In 2009 he joined the Center for Systems and Computational Biology at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, as a Staff Scientist. There, he worked extensively with next generation sequencing data analysis, namely RNA-seq and ChIP-seq, and small RNA-seq.

Dr. Kim’s current work aims to use next generation sequencing technology and information  technology innovation to advance to a new era of personalized medicine and precision medicine for better health care. Toward this goal, he first carefully aggregates biological knowledge building a large database designed to take full advantage of knowledge integration capabilities of semantic web technologies and resources,some already in place at the Divsion of Informatics in the Department of Pathology. This database is then the key resource to analyze new biological data obtained as a part of collaborative work. For example, one can better identify interesting candidates that are related with high impact biological network components associated with specific diseases.

Dr. Kim has experience on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project, and has a particular interest in cancer diagnosis and treatment via computational approaches handling personal genomic data such as whole genome sequencing (WGS) data, RNA-seq, and small RNA-seq data. Although his earlier work was focused on brain tumors, i.e. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), he is now extending this experience to other cancers so that he can achieve a deeper understanding of the genetic basis of cancer. To this end he is building collaborative connections and memberships with UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC), UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Dr. Kim’s laboratory is also developing a service capability in (1) next generation sequencing data analysis (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, and small RNA-seq), (2) preliminary computational cancer diagnosis with individual patient’s genomic profiles (whole genome sequencing, RNA-seq, small RNA-seq).

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