Gurinder Singh Mickey Atwal Laboratory

Quantitative Biology Program
Cancer Center

Welcome to the lab website of Gurinder Singh "Mickey" Atwal.

Fueled by massive amounts of data generated from DNA sequencing technologies, the Atwal Lab is currently focused on population genetics, cancer biology and high-performance computing. We often tackle scientific questions computationally by invoking theoretical concepts from statistical physics and machine learning.

A common thread in our research is the quest to understand collective biological phenomena from the perspective of the physical sciences. To this end, we develop and deploy mathematical and computational tools to address quantitative principles governing the behavior of many-body biological systems, ranging from molecular interactions in a single eukaryotic cell to the evolution of the species Homo sapiens.

Our fantastic team of lab members and collaborators consists of physicists, biologists, mathematicians and computer scientists and we work closely with experimentalists and clinicians both here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and around the world. For more details feel free to browse through our website.

News and Events

06/05/14 Ariel Gewirtz joins the lab as part of the 2014 URP program.

05/22/14 "Statistical Physics of Population Genetics and Complex Diseases" talk at FACM 2014.

04/01/14 New paper published in Neural Computation, "Parametric Inference in the Large Data Limit Using Maximally Informative Models."

03/27/14 "Big data in the biotech industry" seminar at Long Island Forum for Technology.

03/21/14 "Equitability" seminar at Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

02/18/14 New paper published in PNAS, "Equitability, mutual information, and the maximal information coefficient." Press release

12/20/13 Ace postdoc Bernard Fendler departs to join Brigham and Women's Hospital.

11/04/13 Quantitative Biology course for new biology graduate students, CSHL.

10/07/13 "Population genetics of human disease" seminar at UNAM, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

9/03/13 Quantitative Biology programming bootcamp for new biology graduate students, CSHL.

7/22/13 Computational biology seminar at Philips Research, NY.

7/06/13 Ray Ho joins the lab for a rotation, investigating the frontier of de novo haplotyping of DNA sequencing data.

6/06/13 Ricki Korff joins the lab as part of the 2013 summer URP program.

5/07/13 "Stress, selection, sex, and the human genome" colloquium at Renaissance Technologies, NY.

4/30/13 "Big data challenges in cancer systems biology" seminar at Janssen Research & Development, PA.

4/28/13 Mickey receives the Winship Herr Award for Excellence in Teaching.

4/17/13 Will successfully defends his PhD thesis. Congratulations Dr Liao!

4/01/13 Talitha Forcier joins the lab for a rotation, modeling miRNA-mediated morphogenesis in plants.

3/19/13 Congrats to Roslyn High School student Paul Rogofsky for winning the special award in the Intel Excellence in Computer Science competition for his research project, "On Efficiently Defining the Pancake Network".

2/01/13 New preprint on "Equitability, mutual information, and the maximal information content" posted on arXiv.

1/17/13 Check out our new comparative genomics web tool: Kerfuffle. Paper published in BMC Bioinformatics.

1/07/13 Abram Handly-Santana joins the lab for a rotation, analyzing genetic interactions in cancer genomes.

12/18/12 New preprint on "Maximally informative models and diffeomorphic modes in the analysis of large data sets" posted on arXiv.

12/03/12 Co-chairing IEEE International Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics (GENSIPS). Come see our presentation on RNA-Seq analysis and genetic network inference.

11/09/12 Come see presentation on the Indian genome by our collaborators at the 2012 meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

11/07/12 New paper published in Nature revealing the pivotal role of Foxo1 in regulatory T cells.

11/05/12 Lead instructor of Quantitative Biology graduate course at the Watson School of Biological Sciences, CSHL.

9/25/12 New paper published in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, reviewing new approaches to uncovering gene networks in cancer.

9/19/12 Come see our accepted presentation at The Genomics of Common Diseases 2012, Maryland.

9/7/12 New book, "p53 in the Clinics" , published today. Read our chapter on "The Inheritance of p53".

8/14/12 Come see our accepted presentation at the Mechanisms & Models of Cancer meeting at CSHL.

7/15/12 Sophie Thomain joins the lab for graduate rotation, applying information theory to understand miRNA-mediated morphogenesis in plants.

6/26/12 New paper published in Frontiers in Neural Circuits, detailing the genetic expression program in the developing cerebellar cortex.

6/25/12 Reena Gilani and Paul Rogofsky join the lab for the summer of 2012.

6/07/12 Julian Homburger joins the lab as part of the 2012 URP program

5/21/12 KITP Program on the Physics and Mathematics of Cancer, Santa Barbara, CA.

4/02/12 Robert Aboukhalil and Daniel Yun join the lab for graduate rotations.

12/04/11 Program Committee of the 10th IEEE International Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics (GENSIPS).

8/16/11 New paper published in Cancer Cell identifying a gene, PHLPP1, as a prostate tumor suppressor.

6/06/11 Chengyu Liu and Robert Aboukhalil join the lab for the summer of 2011, analyzing gene copy number profiles of tumors.

11/10/10 Co-organizing 9th IEEE International Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics (GENSIPS). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Announcement.

11/02/10 Presentation on "Asymmetric mutation processes in stochastic models of microsatellite allele length distributions in humans" at ASHG Annual Meeting.

Dr. Atwal named by Genome Technology as one of the top 25 young investigators in systems biology. See the profile article here, detailing research on developing new computational algorithms to detect genetic variants important in cancer risk and progression.