Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Seattle, Washington, United States
Sonali Arora is a Bioinformatician at Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center. She develops bioinformatic pipelines to analyze next-generation sequencing data from glioblastoma and prostate cancer patients, with a focus on applying high dimension reductionality techniques and unsupervised learning to large genomic datasets. Her research involves investigating single-cell RNASeq data to understand genetic mechanisms underlying human diseases and analyzing data from CRISPR-Cas9 systems to understand synthetic lethality, the effect of loosing gene function collectively in cancer. Her research has resulted in 22 publications in peer reviewed journals.
Sonali’s research as a “core Bioconductor member” for the Bioconductor project , a repository with 1974 R packages, included developing “GenomeInfoDb” ,“AnnotationHub” - a R package which reproducibly allowed users to retrieve large genomic reference files from standard locations( eg:UCSC, Ensembl) in R. She was also responsible for reviewing and approving several R packages which are now included in the Bioconductor project.
Sonali is a co-author for a book chapter (along with Marc Carlson, Herves Pages) titled “Genomic Annotation Resources in R/Bioconductor”, for the textbook “Statistical Genomics: Methods and Protocol”.
Sonali completed a MS in Biological Sciences from Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY and a BTECH in Biotechnology from SRM University, India. During her thesis at Mount Sinai, she developed a novel method to infer genetic regulatory networks from microarray experiments based on Sparse Neighbor Bayesian Network Learning.
