Alison Tang

Bioinformatics scientist



Me

I am a scientist in training. I began with studying genetics as well as some computer science at UC Berkeley. At Santa Cruz, I developed methods to interrogate the cancer transcriptome with long-read sequencing. I hope to continue to learn and apply and develop computational approaches for solving biological problems. I am currently a translational computational biologist leveraging multi-omic approaches for early cancer detection and monitoring. My interests include precision genomics, complex inheritance, and RNA splice variants and editing in cancer. When I'm not sciencing, I can be found crocheting, bouldering, or gardening. Thanks for reading and please take care of yourself and others. :)




Ph.D. in Bioinformatics

As a student in Angela Brooks' lab, I worked on a project using nanopore sequencing to investigate the mutated SF3B1-altered transcriptome in chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which has led to the development of FLAIR. I have also worked on analyzing RNA isoforms in nanopore native RNA data, RNA editing and variant-aware isoform identification, among other long- and short-read cancer transcriptomics research (CV).





Other contributions

Undergraduate and rotation projects


Epigenetic inheritance

With Dr. Dario Boffelli, I worked on investigating patterns of epigenetic inheritance by comparing NGS sequencing of isogenic mice with and without their genomes repatterned with ethanol.

Fly evolution

With Dr. Russell Corbett-Detig in Rasmus Nielsen's research group, I worked on identifying chromosomal inversions in D. melanogaster genomes by clustering them based on similarity measures near inversion breakpoints. I also worked on developing statistical methods for identifying loci experiencing selection between chromosomal inversions in populations.

LncRNAs and reprogramming

In my rotation with the Daniel Kim lab, I investigated the relationship between transposable element content (i.e. location in transcript, transposon type, associated clade) and lncRNAs activated during cell reprogramming in mouse and human cell lines.