About
Dr. Kann received a B. Sc. and graduate degree in Chemistry from the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo (Uruguay),and a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.She is one of the leading experts in the area of translational Bioinformatics and has chaired several international conference
sessions.
Research interests
Dr. Kann's research focuses on computational
approaches to annotate the human genome with the goal of revealing the molecular underpinning of human diseases.
One of the crucial steps after sequencing the genome is to classify and assign function to gene-encoded proteins. Dr. Kann's work addresses these challenges studying new computational methodologies to align, classify and predict
interactions of proteins as well as to identify the role of certain mutations in the disease mechanisms.
Teaching interests
Dr. Kann's main focus is in teaching students the basic and more advanced aspects of bioinformatics. She had taught BINF 313, intro bioinformatics and BINF495, Bioinformatics seminar since 2007. She has also taught a new graduate seminar based on the book she edited, Translational Bioinformatics, a collection in PLOS Computational Biology.
Education
- Other — National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH) (2007)
- Ph D, Thesis Title: “Protein Sequence Alignment: Theory, Algorithms and Optimal Score function”. Advisor Prof. Richard A. Goldstein. (GPA:7.9/8.0) — University of Michigan (2001)
- MS, Pharmaceutical Chemistry degree — Universidad de la República. Montevideo (1994)
- BS, Chemistry — Universidad de la República (1991)
Publications
- Empirical null estimation using zero-inflated discrete mixture distributions and its application to protein domain data. 2018
- Reading Between the Genes: Computational Models to Discover Function from Noncoding DNA. 2018
- Oncodomains: A protein domain-centric framework for analyzing rare variants in tumor samples 2017
- Recruitment of Tiam1 to Semaphorin 4D Activates Rac and Enhances Proliferation, Invasion, and Metastasis in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma. 2017
- Regulatory Single-Nucleotide Variant Predictor Increases Predictive Performance of Functional Regulatory Variants. 2016
- INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO COMBINING GENOTYPE, PHENOTYPE, EPIGENETIC, AND EXPOSURE DATA FOR PRECISION DIAGNOSTICS. 2016
- Mac-1 Regulates IL-13 Activity in Macrophages by Directly Interacting with IL-13Rα1. 2015
- Small-angle X-ray scattering method to characterize molecular interactions: Proof of concept. 2015
- Hybrid curation of gene-mutation relations combining automated extraction and crowdsourcing. 2014
- Towards precision medicine: advances in computational approaches for the analysis of human variants. 2013
- Domain landscapes of somatic mutations in cancer. 2013
- A protein domain-centric approach for the comparative analysis of human and yeast phenotypically relevant mutations. 2013
- Modeling cell heterogeneity: from single-cell variations to mixed cells. 2013
- A mutation-centric approach to identifying pharmacogenomic relations in text. 2012
- Domain Landscapes of Somatic Mutations in Cancer 2012
- Validating Candidate Gene-Mutation Relations in MEDLINE Abstracts via Crowdsourcing. 2012
- Incorporating molecular and functional context into the analysis and prioritization of human variants associated with cancer. 2012
- Translating Mendelian and complex inheritance of Alzheimer's disease genes for predicting unique personal genome variants. 2012
- Chapter 4: Protein interactions and disease. 2012
- Toward an automatic method for extracting cancer- and other disease-related point mutations from the biomedical literature. 2011
- DMDM: domain mapping of disease mutations. 2010
- Threshold Average Precision (TAP-k): a measure of retrieval designed for bioinformatics. 2010
- In silico functional profiling of human disease-associated and polymorphic amino acid substitutions. 2010
- Advances in translational bioinformatics: computational approaches for the hunting of disease genes. 2010
- Correlated evolution of interacting proteins: looking behind the mirrortree. 2009
- Gain and loss of phosphorylation sites in human cancer. 2008
- MutDB: update on development of tools for the biochemical analysis of genetic variation. 2008
- Protein interactions and disease: computational approaches to uncover the etiology of diseases. 2007
- Predicting protein domain interactions from coevolution of conserved regions. 2007
- The identification of complete domains within protein sequences using accurate E-values for semi-global alignment. 2007
- Transcriptional interactions during smallpox infection and identification of early infection biomarkers. 2007
- Histone structure and nucleosome stability. 2005
- Predicting protein-protein interaction by searching evolutionary tree automorphism space. 2005
- A structure-based method for protein sequence alignment. 2005
- A new score function for the detection of remote homologs. 2004
- Performance evaluation of a new algorithm for the detection of remote homologs with sequence comparison. 2002
- Optimizing for Success: A new score function for distantly related proteins. in Fourth annual international conference on computational molecular biology (RECOMB) 2000
Presentations
- Can structural biology meet Cancer genomics? 2023
- A protein domain approach to understanding diseases 2015
Grants and Contracts
- AI-Driven Multi-Omics Approach to Optimize Lung Cancer Therapy 2025
- Development of drugs targeting proteins with mutations in cancer. 2024
Courses Taught
- Bioinformatics Intro
- Introduction to Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
- Undergrad. Lab/Field Rsch
- Bioinformatics Intro