Lab Members

Simon Coetzee began his career doing bioinformatics analysis of GWAS data as part of the U19 GAME-ON consortium at the University of Southern California. Since then, he has focused on the functional consequences of nonprotein coding risk regions within the context of many complex diseases. To this end, he was part of a team that developed a software program called FunciSNP, which is an R/Bioconductor tool integrating functional noncoding datasets with genetic association studies to identify candidate regulatory SNPs (Coetzee et al., 2012). Coetzee has worked on analyzing and interpreting large genomic datasets, including next-generation sequencing from internal collaborations and downloaded from public datasets such as 1000 Genomes, The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), NIH Epigenomics Roadmap and The Cancer Genome Atlas. At Cedars-Sinai, Coetzee works with Benjamin Berman, PhD, and Dennis Hazelett, PhD, to develop automation tools for analysis and functional annotation of genetic variants from large genome and epigenome sequencing projects. He is also continuing his development of novel algorithms for the analysis of gene regulatory sequences.