Peter J. Park, PhD
| Department | Informatics Program |
 |
| Hospital Title | Faculty, Children's Hospital Informatics Program | |
| Academic Title | Associate Professor of Pediatrics | |
| Phone | 617-432-7373 | |
| Fax | 617-432-0693 | |
| Peter J. Park | ||
| Location |
300 Longwood Avenue Boston MA 02115 |
Research Overview
Recent technological developments have enabled researchers to generate experimental data in an unprecedented, genome-wide scale. Our aim is to gain biological insights through computational and statistical analysis of genomic data. We are interested in (i) understanding epigenetic regulation in a variety of systems using genome-wide profiling of histone modifications, transcription factors, and nucleosome positioning (ChIP-seq or MNase-seq) and (ii) characterizing copy number and structural variations in genomes of diseased tissues, especially in cancer, and to understand how they impact disease initiation and progression. We have been involved in two major consortium projects: ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) and TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas); we also collaborate with a number of experimental labs, both in the Harvard Medical area and around the world. The current group consists of 13 postdoctoral fellows, 3 graduate students, and 2 analysts, all engaged in analysis of next-generation sequencing data.
About Peter Park
Dr. Park is a computational biologist specializing in epigenomics and cancer genomics. He was originally trained in applied mathematics at Harvard and Caltech, writing his doctoral thesis on numerical analysis of partial differential equations. He became interested in molecular biology and genomics while doing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Biostatistics Department at the Harvard School of Public Health. He moved to Children's Hospital Boston in 2001 as an instructor at Harvard Medical School and has been there since, becoming an assistant professor in 2006 and an
associate professor in 2010.
He is a member of the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics, Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, and Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is a co-director of the doctoral program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) at HMS. He is also a member of of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program faculty at HMS and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, an affiliate member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Children's Hospital Stem Cell Program, and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He is also an adjunct professor in the Bioinformatics Program at Boston University.
Key Publications
- Comprehensive analysis of the chromatin landscape in Drosophila melanogaster Kharchenko PV, Alekseyenko AA, Schwartz YB, Minoda A, Riddle NC, Ernst J, Sabo PJ, Larschan E, Gorchakov AA, Gu T, Linder-Basso D, Plachetka A, Shanower G, Tolstorukov MY, Luquette LJ, Xi R, Jung YL, Park RW, Bishop EP, Canfield TP, Sandstrom R, Thurman RE, MacAlpine DM, Stamatoyannopoulos JA, Kellis M, Elgin SCR, Kuroda MI, Pirrotta V, Karpen GH*, Park PJ*. Nature, 471:480-5, 2011
- Impact of chromatin structure on sequence variability in the human genome Tolstorukov MY, Volfovsky N, Stephens RM, Park PJ. Nature Structural & Molecular Biolology, 8:510-5, 2011
- X chromosome dosage compensation via enhanced transcriptional elongation in Drosophila Larschan E*, Bishop EP*, Kharchenko PV, Core L, Lis JT, Park PJ**, Kuroda MI**. Nature, 471:115-8, 2011
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Integrated genomic analyses of ovarian carcinoma Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network (including Park lab members: Kim TM, Park RW, Lee E, Park PJ as part of Harvard/Broad Genomic Data Analysis Center and Harvard Genome Characterization Center).Nature, 474:609-15, 2011
