Lab Introduction
You have reached the lab for Genomics, Evolution, and Development
(GED) at Michigan State U. This lab is run by Dr. C. Titus Brown, who
is an assistant professor in the departments of
Computer Science and
Engineering (CSE) and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG)
at MSU.
In addition to
his research interests, he teaches a number of
courses. Dr. Brown also blogs under his nom de plume, Dr. C. Titus Brown.
In recent years, our interests have shifted to the question of how to use large data sets, especially next-gen sequencing data sets, to generate the best possible biological hypotheses for subsequent testing. We are working in the areas of microbial ecology (with metagenomics), evo-devo and disease (mRNAseq), and bacterial and animal genomics. We are increasingly interested in the question of how to educate biologists to work with data and tools, and have invested quite a bit of energy in a summer course as well as Software Carpentry materials.
The development and extension of data analysis tools and toolkits is an increasingly large interest of the lab. We are in dire need of advanced computational tools for modern biology -- tools for analyzing data from whole genome sequencing and sequence annotation, microarrays, ChIP-chip data, massively parallel sequencing, regulatory genomics, third-party databases, and metagenomic sequences. As part of our research we are pushing the interface between investigative tools and biological science, which will lead to new types of questions and (hopefully!) answers to old questions. In connection with this research, we are very interested in the process of developing maintainable and extensible software.
A central focus of the group is on open source/access/science. Visit our github site for some of our software, and check out our submitted papers and grants here.
The blog and research interests page are the best places to go for up-to-date information.
Titus Brown's CV is available here.