E. Michael Gertz, Ph.D.
- Center for Cancer Research
- National Cancer Institute
- Building 10, Room 1-5132
- Bethesda, MD 20892
- 240.858.3381
- gertzem@nih.gov
RESEARCH SUMMARY
E. Michael Gertz is a computational biologist working on cancer genomics, biological sequence analysis and cancer immunology.
Areas of Expertise
E. Michael Gertz, Ph.D.
Research
E. Michael Gertz trained as a numerical analyst in nonlinear optimization. Since joining the National Institutes of Health, he has applied his education and training to solve complex computational biology problems, specializing in sequence analysis, algorithms, linkage analysis of primary immune deficiencies, and bioinformatic analysis of amino acid substitutions in mutated genes. He developed software of analysis of aneuploidy in tumors and tumor cell lines through multi-color FISH (fluorescence in-situ hybridization). He contributed to the development on the BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) software package for biological sequence analysis, and developed code to apply compositional based adjustment to translated database searches (TBLASTn). While at NCBI, Michael received the NLM Regents Award for Scholarship and Technical Achievement, for his important contributions to the molecular characterization of two previously unrecognized immune diseases–STK4 deficiency and LRBA deficiency–thus enabling patients with these diseases to be properly diagnosed. He has continued his study of the evolution of cancer within human tumors, and joined the Cancer Data Science Laboratory at NCI in September 2018.
Publications
- Bibliography Link
- View Dr. Gertz's PubMed Summary.
FISHtrees 3.0: Tumor Phylogenetics Using a Ploidy Probe
PSEUDOMARKER 2.0: efficient computation of likelihoods using NOMAD
Deleterious mutations in LRBA are associated with a syndrome of immune deficiency and autoimmunity
Inflammatory bowel disease and mutations affecting the interleukin-10 receptor
Composition-based statistics and translated nucleotide searches: improving the TBLASTN module of BLAST
Biography
E. Michael Gertz, Ph.D.
E. Michael Gertz received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego. His advisor was Dr. Phillip Gill, and he specialized in numerical analysis and nonlinear optimization. He completed post-doctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University, where he studied interior-point methods for quadratic and nonlinear programming.
E. Michael Gertz also had a lifelong interest in biology and the medical field, which led him to the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH where he expanded applications of computational mathematics and computer science to interdisciplinary study of complex health problems, including rare immunologic disorders and the evolution of cancer within human tumors. He joined the new Cancer Data Science Laboratory in the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, in September of 2018.