Sophie Schbath's home page

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Sophie Schbath

Institut National de la Recherche Agrononique
Unité Mathématique, Informatique & Génome
Domaine de Vilvert
F-78352 Jouy-en-Josas Cedex
Sophie.Schbath at jouy.inra.fr
Fax : +33.1.34.65.28.90

I got a PhD thesis in Statistics from the University of Paris V on October 25, 1995. I made my thesis in the Biometrics laboratory of INRA (French National Institute of Agronomic Research) at Jouy-en-Josas, in which I obtained a permanent position of researcher in August 1996. In 1996, I was a one-year post-doctoral fellow at Los Angeles, in the team of Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman. Since January 2000, I have been a member of a new multidisciplinary unit of INRA called "Mathématique, Informatique & Génome" (MIG) and located in Jouy-en-Josas. I defended my habilitation on September 22, 2003. I am now Director of Research.

My main interest is on statistical analysis of word or motif occurrences in biological sequences. In particular, I have done lots of work on statistical methods to detect words significantly over- or under-represented with respect to what should be expected under a Markovian model. I am still involved in the development of the R'MES software I have initiated. I also look at the locations of words along genomes and more precisely I am interested in the detection of "co-located" motifs that may be involved in a common biological mechanism; such dependence may suggest a possible protein interaction.
During my post-doc at the University of Southern California, I have investigated another area: physical mapping. I studied the effect of two kind of heterogeneities of the data on the progress of a physical mapping project by anchoring (number of islands, proportion of genome covered, averaged length of islands). These heterogeneities can be related to the anchor/clone locations and to the clone lengths.
In 2005, I started to work on the detection of network motifs, which are subgraphs with a significantly high frequency in biological networks.

From 1995, I have been the leader of the French research group "Statistics of Biological Sequences" (SSB, renamed Statistics for Systems Biology) composed now of about 30 statisticians involved in bioinformatics problems.

Please note the conference Mathematics for Biological Networks SSB is organizing in Paris on December 17-18, 2007.

Sophie.Schbath_AT_jouy.inra.fr (November 8, 2007).