Ross Cameron Hardison

For over four decades, I have pursued the long-term research goal of understanding molecular mechanisms and evolution of gene regulation in mammals. My research has included fundamental studies of chromatin structure, developing methods for isolating molecular clones of genomic DNA from mammals (the beginnings of genomics), determining structure and developmental expression profiles of globin genes, using interspecies sequence comparisons to illuminate genome evolution and predict regulatory regions, and determining gene expression and epigenetic profiles genome-wide in search of global mechanisms of gene regulation. This diversity of projects has been enabled by excellent workers in my lab and by several long-term collaborations. I worked with Drs. Webb Miller, David Haussler, Francesca Chiaromonte, and James Taylor to generate interspecies alignments of genome sequences and predict gene regulatory function from patterns in those alignments. In collaboration with Drs. Mitch Weiss, Gerd Blobel, David Bodine, Yu Zhang, James Taylor, and Feng Yue, we apply massively parallel, short read sequencing to determine transcriptomes and to map occupancy by key transcription factors and the landscape of histone modifications during differentiation of multiple hematopoietic lineages in mouse. Importantly, the comparative genomics and epigenomic data are analyzed integratively to model and predict gene regulatory modules, always leading to experimental tests of those predictions in my laboratory. This same paradigm of data gathering, integrative analysis, and experimental tests guided our work as members of the ENCODE Project Consortium since its inception. My own laboratory produced over 100 replicated experiments released through our work in the mouse ENCODE consortium (on which I was a PI) and as a collaboration with Dr. Richard Myers at HudsonAlpha and Dr. Barbara Wold at Caltech. In summary, I bring extensive, diverse experience in biochemical, genetic, and evolutionary approaches to studies of genome function and gene regulation, all of them enabled by sophisticated bioinformatics.