Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. I am also affiliated with the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Center for Systems Biology, which are both part of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. I have been at Duke since September 2001, when I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of David Gifford, Tommi Jaakkola, and Rick Young.
Generally, my research interests are in computational systems biology and machine learning. Specifically, my work focuses on the development and application of new statistical learning algorithms to complex problems in systems biology. I am especially, but not exclusively, interested in:
- mapping out networks of transcriptional regulation,
- revealing mechanisms behind control of the eukaryotic cell cycle,
- reconstructing accurate protein-protein and domain-domain interaction networks,
- understanding how information flows in the brain during sensory processing and learning tasks,
- identifying imprinted genes, their regulatory mechanisms, and their implications for disease, and
- improving the diagnosis and treatment of disease using high-throughput clinical data.
Although these problems are quite diverse, a number of common themes appear repeatedly throughout my work: probabilistic representations, Bayesian statistics, fusion of information from multiple sources, optimization of joint objective functions, and learning in high-dimensional spaces without overfitting. Many of these themes are variations on two simple ideas: careful attention to biology in the development of statistical models and the use of informative Bayesian priors to both regularize and guide automated learning.
Contact Information
Prof. Alexander Hartemink
Duke University
Department of Computer Science
Box 90129
Durham, NC 27708-0129
tel: (919) 660-6514
fax: (919) 660-6519
office: LSRC, Room D239
email: amink at cs.duke.edu
