01/04/11

Story by Peggy Graham

Stanislav Svojanovsky

JCCC scholar discusses bioinformatics, biomedical research

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — To be healthy, people have to have all their genes doing the right thing at the right time. Disruption in gene expression is responsible for many diseases. And now new technology, microarrays, allows scientists to analyze gene expression as a way to understand diseases with underlying genetic causes and pinpoint possible therapies.

Stanislav Svojanovsky, adjunct professor, science, JCCC; research associate professor, the University of Kansas Medical Center; and instructor, department of electrical engineering and computer science, KU-Lawrence, will give two lectures related to his research — microarray genomic expression analysis and neural network drug design.

His lectures, part of the JCCC College Scholars program, are free and open to the public.

• His first lecture, Microarray Technology in Biomedical Research, will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 1, in the M.R. and Evelyn Hudson Auditorium on the second floor of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. A reception precedes the event at 6:30 p.m. in the Regnier Center Atrium.
  
  In this lecture, Svojanovsky will provide an overview of the microarray technology development and its application in current biomedical research, looking at its multiple steps from data acquisition through statistical analysis and biological interpretations.
• His second lecture, Artificial Intelligence Application in Computer-Assisted Molecular Design, will be at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 3, in the Hudson Auditorium.
  
  This presentation will look at how Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), a computational system that can learn on its own, can be designed to process input data from High Throughput Screening (HTS) as a means to recover active compounds from a large data set. Identified active compounds can, in turn, lead to the formulation of computer-assisted anticancer drugs.

Svojanovsky has worked in the rapidly expanding bioinformatics field for the last 11 years with a focus on the microarray data analysis process, which includes experimental design, data standardization, image acquisition and analysis, data normalization, statistical significance inference, exploratory data analysis, class prediction and biological pathway analysis.

His research activities include computer application in gene research such as the use of the neural network in computer-assisted drug design, prediction of a subset of active compounds from HTS and information theory-based analysis of splicing mutations.

Svojanovsky, who teaches chemistry at JCCC, has an undergraduate degree in chemical technology from the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic; master of science degree in applied statistics from the Western Michigan University; and a doctorate in bioanalytical chemistry with honors from the University of Kansas.

The JCCC College Scholars program showcases the research of four faculty each academic year. For more information about the JCCC College Scholars program, contact Karen Martley, director, Staff and Organizational Development, 913-469-8500, ext. 3467.

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