Current Research Interests

Dr. Qin has multi-disciplinary training in statistics and biology. Her research interests are in the application and development of statistical methods for the analysis of genomic data and their use in clinical studies and cancer research. She has evaluated properties of various preprocessing methods for gene expression microarrays, and developed a mixture-model based method to normalize arrays derived from heterogeneous samples jointly with Dr. Satagopan. She has also developed a regression-based method for gene clustering, called CORM, relating gene expression patterns to clinical and other genomic covariates. She has a particular interest in the analysis of microRNA expression arrays, having applied CORM to group candidate microRNA targets and is currently investigating the normalization issue for microRNA arrays. Dr. Qin collaborates closely with the soft tissue sarcoma group on the analysis of clinical and genomic data, as well as the design of clinical trials with a phase II emphasis. One recent project is to develop and validate a genomic predictor for distant recurrence in liposarcoma. Dr. Qin is also involved in a number of genomic collaborations from clinical areas such as pediatric tumors, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer, which are supported by grants from the NIH, the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center, and the Starr Cancer Consortium.

Selected Bibliography

1. Qin LX and Satagopan J. Normalization method for transcriptional studies of heterogeneous samples - simultaneous array normalization and identification of equivalent expression. Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology 2008, 8: Article 10. [PubMed Abstract]

2. Qin LX. An Integrative Analysis of microRNA and mRNA Expression - A Case Study. Cancer Informatics 2008, 6:369-379. [PubMed Abstract]

3. Qin LX and Self SG. The clustering of regression models method with applications to gene expression data. Biometrics 2006, 62: 526-533. [PubMed Abstract]

4. Qin LX, Beyer R, Hudson N, Linford N, Morris D, Kerr KF. Validation of data transformation methods for oligonucleotide arrays with qRT-PCR measurements. BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:23. [PubMed Abstract]

5. Qin LX, Kerr KF, Contributing Members of the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium. Empirical evaluation of data transformations and ranking statistics for microarray analysis. Nucleic Acids Research 2004, 32(18):5471-5479. [PubMed Abstract]