Dana Pe'er has been presented with the 2007 NIH Director's New Innovator Award (http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sep2007/od-18a.htm). Part of an NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative, this award recognizes outstanding scientists who are "well-positioned to make significant — and potentially transformative — discoveries in a variety of areas.”

This award, proposed by NIH Director, Elias A. Zerhoni, MD was created to help new scientists fund highly innovative approaches to major research challenges that could lead to significant medical advances.

Dr. Pe'er is assistant professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, a member of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and an investigator at the MAGNet Center. She utilizes computational and biotechnology approaches to understand how a cell’s regulatory network processes signals and how the signal processing goes wrong in cancer.

geWorkbench, the bioinformatics platform of the MAGNet Center, was recognized with an excellence award during the 2007 annual meeting of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) initiative. The geWorkbench project team was sited for "excellence in the design, planning and implementation of one of the first unrestricted open-source software projects from integrative genomics analysis."

Barry Honig, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics and Director of C2B2, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in an October 6 ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Academy is an independent research center conducting multidisciplinary studies of problems in science, technology, and global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education.

Dana Pe'er, Assistant Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, has joined C2B2. Prof. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function, and evolution of molecular networks. Molecular networks sense multiple signals from the environment, robustly process appropriate cellular responses and orchestrate the regulation of hundreds of genes and proteins to execute these responses. This remarkable functionality occurs through diverse mechanisms including regulation of transcription, epigenetic changes, translation, degradation, post-translational signaling, and localization. Prof. Pe'er's lab develops computational methods to integrate diverse high throughput data and unravel a holistic systems level view of the cell in an attempt to answer such questions as: How does this calculation differ between cell-type, individual and species? How do small changes to the regulatory network propagate and manifest in phenotypic diversity and changes? What is the connection between regulation and fitness? How does dysfunctional regulation lead to disease such as cancer? 

Prof. Pe'er is a graduate of the Hebrew University. Before joining Columbia in 2006 she held a Research fellow appointment at George Church's lab, Dept. of Genetics, Harvard Medical School