Pei-Chen Peng

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Postdoctoral Scientist

Pei-Chen Peng is a postdoctoral scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She works with Dr. Simon Gayther in the Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics. Her research interest lies in computational biology. She develops computational and statistical tools, to interpret genetic variations related to complex traits and diseases.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2018, advised by Prof. Saurabh Sinha. She holds a M.S. and a B.S. in Computer Science from National Taiwan University in 2013 and 2011 respectively. She received a Google Anita Borg Award in 2012 and a Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarship in 2016.

Research Abstract:

Computational modeling is rapidly gaining popularity in genomics. The advent of high-throughput genomic assays provides snapshots of biological activities including where proteins bind to the DNA and which parts of the genome are transcribed. Moreover, recent innovations in fields such as genetic variants identification and whole-genome sequencing promise rapid expansion of this wealth of data.
My research focuses on developing computational models, using these models to understand biological mechanisms, and applying findings to derive new clinical and experimental practice. My works lie in four areas: quantifying functional impacts of genetic variants on cancers, particularly ovarian cancer; integrating multi-omics data to understand cancer initiation and development; developing computational models to predict context-specific gene expression from DNA sequences; and building statistical tools to examine evolutionary mechanisms such as buffering and combinatorial interaction.