Love Lab

PI: Michael I. Love
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Department of Genetics
Member of Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

@mikelove — Google Scholar — Biostatistics Dept profile

michaelisaiahlove at gmail dot com *

* for software questions, do not email, instead use the Bioconductor support site

Upcoming talks, seminars, courses

• BIRS 20w5197: June 14 - June 19. Mathematical Frameworks for Integrative Analysis of Emerging Biological Data Types
• Statistical Methods for Functional Genomics: CSHL: June 26 - July 9.
• BioC2020: July 29 - 31. Quantification of droplet scRNA-seq and import into Bioconductor with alevin and tximeta

News

• Arjun Bhattacharya’s second and third papers are preprinted:
  “An approach for normalization and quality control for NanoString RNA expression data”
  doi: 10.1101/2020.04.08.032490, and
  “Multi-omic strategies for transcriptome-wide prediction and association studies”
  doi: 10.1101/2020.04.17.047225
• Tximeta is published in PLOS Computational Biology doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007664
• Arjun Bhattacharya’s breast cancer TWAS is published in Genome Biology doi: 10.1186/s13059-020-1942-6
• New paper on F1000Research: From first author Stuart Lee (Monash U.), “Fluent genomics with plyranges and tximeta” doi: 10.12688/f1000research.22259.1
• Sean McCabe’s second paper is preprinted: “ACTOR: a latent Dirichlet model to compare expressed isoform proportions to a reference panel” doi: 10.1101/856401

Research

The Love Lab uses statistical models to infer biologically meaningful patterns in high-dimensional datasets, and develops open-source statistical software for the Bioconductor Project. At UNC-Chapel Hill, we often collaborate with groups in the Genetics Department and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, studying how genetic variants relevant to diseases are associated with changes in molecular and cellular phenotypes.

• We collaborate with the Patro lab in the development of computational and statistical methods for quantification of RNA transcript abundance, including the software packages Salmon and tximeta.
• We collaborate with the Stein lab in the study of genetic risk for neuropsychiatric disorders, leveraging data from molecular assays of chromatin accessibility and the transcriptome in neural progenitor cell lines to macroscale phenotypes such as gross human brain structure measured with MRI.
• We collaborate with the Troester lab and the Carolina Breast Cancer Study, investigating the intersection between gene expression profiles of breast tumors and genetic risk for breast cancer, with a focus on racial disparities in patient outcomes.
• We develop, support, and maintain the DESeq2 package for statistical analysis of RNA-seq and other sequencing experiments, and associated packages and workflows for analyzing genomics data. See the Software tab for more details.

PI - Background

From 2013-2016, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Rafael Irizarry in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Department at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. I completed a PhD in Computational Biology and Scientific Computing (2013) in the Vingron Department at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and the Mathematics and Informatics Department of the Freie Universität, Berlin. I completed a Statistics M.S. (2010) and Mathematics B.S. (2005) at Stanford University.

Past news items

• November 2019 - Joshua Zitovsky’s first paper is up on F1000Research: “Fast effect size shrinkage software for beta-binomial models of allelic imbalance” doi: 10.12688/f1000research.20916.1
• October 2019 - Sarah Reifeis’s first paper is preprinted: “Assessing exposure effects on gene expression” doi: 10.1101/806554
• August 2019 - Anqi Zhu’s second paper published in Nucleic Acids Research: doi: 10.1093/nar/gkz622, which describes the Swish method in the fishpond package.
• July 2019 - Sean McCabe’s first paper published in Briefings in Bioinformatics: doi: 10.1093/bib/bbz070, 2019 Author Manuscript
• February 2019 - Anqi Zhu’s second paper posted to bioRxiv: Nonparametric expression analysis using inferential replicate counts
• October 2018 - Swimming downstream… DTU workflow published on F1000Research is now indexed.
• July 2018 - Sean McCabe sent off his first preprint: MOVIE: Multi-Omics VIsualization of Estimated contributions, which describes the movie software.
• June 2018 - A new differential transcript usage workflow from the Love Lab is published in F1000Research: Swimming downstream
• April 2018 - Anqi Zhu sent off the first preprint from the lab: Heavy-tailed prior distributions for sequence count data, which describes the apeglm software.
• December 2017 - Anqi Zhu and Michael Love featured in a Nature article talking about the Bioconductor Project for genomic data analysis.