Sandra Rodriguez-Zas is helping find ways to prevent and cure diseases in both livestock and humans. She uses biostatistics and computational approaches to identify biomarkers and molecular pathways associated with health, reproduction, and performance in livestock species, and cancers in humans. Rodriguez-Zas is an experienced biostatistician and bioinformatician with extensive federal funding and publication record in the development and application of computational and statistical methods to test hypothesis and mine data from genome, transcriptome, and proteome studies. The methodological applications of her innovative molecular network reconstruction, genome annotation, epigenetic mechanisms, molecular isoform identification and neuropeptide discovery approaches support advancement of the understanding of behavioral disorders, addiction, cancer, growth and reproductive physiology, hyperalgesia and maternal immune activation.
Rodriguez-Zas received her MS in Quantitative Genetics and her PhD in Statistical Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She runs the University of Illinois Laboratory of Statistical Genetics and Bioinformatics.