Bioinformatics. Computer Science. Applied statistics. Mathematical modeling. Information theory.

Yuriy Fofanov received his M.S. in Physics in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics in 1988 from Kuibyshev (Samara) State University, USSR. Since joining the Computer Science Department at the University of Houston, he has been the director of the departments Bioinformatics Lab and an adjunct assistant professor both in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at UH and in the Department of Health Informatics at the School of Health Information Science at the University of Texas. In 2002 Fofanov also became a faculty member for the W.M. Keck Center for Computational and Structural Biology.

The focus of the Bioinformatics Lab is two-fold: gene expression and genomic sequence analysis, each of which has many on-going projects. The gene expression projects consist of approaches in micro-array data normalization, using local invariants for genetic regulatory networks reconstruction, and a mutual information approach to identify nonlinear patterns in gene expressions. Genomic sequence analysis projects include studies of the statistical properties of short subsequences in microbial and viral genomes and the design of ultra-specific host/background blind probes and primers for microbial and viral identification. The latter project was recently awarded funding through the Department of Homeland Securitys Advanced Research Projects Agency, Science and Technology Directorate. The successes of the laboratory are made possible due to our many collaborations with faculty members at UH in the Biology and Biochemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Chemistry Departments as well as collaborations with the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, the University of Texas at Houston, the University of Arizona, the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and Genomics USA in Houston, Texas.