Dr. Vonn Walter's primary research field is cancer genomics, particularly gene expression profiling, DNA copy number analysis and integrated analysis of multiple genomic data types. He is interested in all aspects of RNA sequencing data analysis, including pre-processing, normalization, differential expression analysis, unsupervised clustering, development of gene expression classifiers, pathway analysis, and network analysis. His PhD thesis led to the development of the DiNAMIC algorithm for assessing the statistical significance of recurrent genomic aberrations, such as regions of the genome where DNA copy number gains or losses are observed across multiple subjects. He also created the mVisAGe R package for computing and visualizing bivariate correlations that can be used to perform exploratory analyses for identifying regions of the genome where underling genomic aberrations affect the expression of regional genes.

Dr. Walter enjoys team science, and plays a variety of roles in ongoing collaborations with researchers at Penn State College of Medicine and elsewhere. He is a member of the Biostatistics/Bioinformatics Shared Resource of Penn State Cancer Institute.