Dr. Liliana Florea is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, where she develops computational methods for analyzing large scale sequencing data to help characterize molecular mechanisms of diseases. Her research interests include comparing and analyzing genomes, characterizing genes and alternative splicing variations, and predicting non-coding RNA elements in human-virus interactions. Before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2011, Dr. Florea served on the faculty at the University of Maryland and the George Washington University. Previously, she was a member of the team of scientists at Celera Genomics that produced the first sequence of the human genome. Her work has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology and has been funded by several NSF awards. Dr. Florea holds a PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University. B.S., University of Bucharest (Romania) (1994) M.Sc., Pennsylvania State University (Pennsylvania) (1998) Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University (Pennsylvania) (2000)

miRNA genomics and peptide-based vaccine design; Gene annotation; Alternative splicing; Comparative and evolutionary genomics; Algorithms and tools for cDNA and genomic sequence alignment

Song L, Sabunciyan S, Florea L. CLASS2: Accurate and efficient splice variant annotation from RNA-seq reads, Nucl. Acids Res., 2016; 44(10):e98. Song L, Florea L. Rcorrector: efficient and accurate error correction for Illumina RNA-seq reads, GigaScience, 2015; 4:48. Bao W, Florea L, Wu N, Wang Z, Banaudha K, Qian J, Houzet L, Kumar R, Kumar A. Loss of nuclear PTEN in HCV-infected human hepatocytes, Infectious Agents and Cancer, 2014; 9:23. Eswaran J, Horvath A, Godbole S, Reddy SD, Mudvari P, Ohshiro K, Cyanam D, Nair S, Fuqua SAW, Polyak K, Florea LD, Kumar R. RNA sequencing of cancer reveals novel splicing alterations, Sci. Rep., 2013; 3:1689.​ Walenz B, Florea L. Sim4db and leaff: Utilities for fast batch spliced alignment and sequence indexing. Bioinformatics, 2011; 27(13):1869-70.