The G²Lab at NYGC and Columbia University is interested in human health and well-being, not only from a biological perspective but also from a human dignity perspective. We work at the intersection of genomics and privacy/security.

Please visit our publications page for our recent work and our github page for the tools developed in the lab.

One of our overarching research goals is to employ a multi-disciplinary approach, combining engineering, cryptography, bioinformatics, molecular biology and sequencing techniques, and bioethics to increase biomedical data access and analysis to a wider group of scientists while preserving individuals’ privacy. We believe achieving this goal is only possible by taking a multidisciplinary privacy research fueled by an understanding of the biology behind the data in order to develop methods and file formats with high utility. Given the interconnected nature of data privacy and utility, bridging these diverse fields will be imperative to maximizing the utility of biological data while preserving patient privacy. 

We are also interested in developing tools to map the regulatory wiring of the chromatin to interrogate the regulatory variation affecting the molecular phenotypes associated with diseases. Much of our work focuses on creating reproducible, efficient, easy-to-use, and cloud-ready software for the broad biomedical community. The computational work in the lab will be supported by experimental approaches, creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies.