COBRE Principal Investigator and Director, Center for Quantitative Biology
Dr. Whitfield is Chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science, Director of Center for Quantitative Biology, and Co-Director of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Big Data in the Life Sciences Training Program. His research is focused on mining big data, systems biology and genomic networks in systemic autoimmune disease. He has focused on understanding the heterogeneity and identifying novel therapeutic targets for SSc and how this can be used to better treat patients with the disease. Multi-tissue networks developed by my group have demonstrated consistent, deregulated processes across end target tissues in SSc, pulmonary fibrosis (PF) and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). He is using these networks to understand the mechanism of disease, identify novel therapeutic targets and reposition FDA approved drugs for SSc.
Dr. Whitfield has mentored 15 PhD students, 8 post-doctoral fellows, 5 undergraduate students, 2 clinical fellows in his laboratory, serving on the qualifying or thesis exam committees of more than 50 PhD students in the Molecular and Cellular Biology and Quantitative Biomedical Sciences Graduate Programs. He has mentored numerous junior faculty through promotion and successful grant submissions.