Professor Wong Wing-hung, Stephen R. Pierce Family Goldman Sachs Professor in Science and Human Health at Stanford University and member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, gave a talk titled “Statistics and Sequencing Technology” at a City University Distinguished Lecture on 22 June.

In his lecture, Professor Wong discussed the role of statistics in the “primary” and “secondary” analysis of DNA sequencing data. He explained the process of turning the raw signal of the sequencing instrument to sequence reads, and the process of aligning and assembling the reads to detect variations  from the reference genome.

In addition, Professor Wong presented the past and present generations of sequencing technologies and briefly examined some new statistical challenges posted by emerging (third generation) sequencing technologies.

Motivated by problems from personalised medicine and systems biology, Professor Wong is currently developing Bayesian nonparametric methods and high performance computing solutions to these problems. In the past, his group had developed a number of widely used bioinformatics tools.

Professor Arthur Ellis, Provost, gave welcome remarks and Professor Yan Hong, Dean of the College of Science and Engineering, introduced Professor Wong before the lecture began.