Detection of molecular pathways
Our work on expression analysis provides the ideal platform from which to attack larger functional genomic questions related to genewise interactions and the decomposition of gene expression cross-sections into distinct molecular pathways. Special areas of interest in which these issues dominate include mutations related to haematological malignancies, mammary stem cells and the origins of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and human-specific regulatory adaptations and their contribution to diseases. Answering these biological questions requires the creation of new statistical theory including methods for accounting for genewise correlations in small samples, gene set testing, testing of arbitrary combinations of hypotheses, and more general hierarchical multiple testing approaches.