Contact
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Ann Loraine, Ph.D. Associate Professor Dept. of Bioinformatics and Genomics University of North Carolina at Charlotte 704-250-5750 aloraine  uncc.edu |
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Loraine Bio
Ann Loraine's home town is Austin, Texas. She attended high school at SF Austin High and spent her senior year at Chiswick Community School in London. After winning a full scholarship, she returned to the U.S. to attend the University of Texas at Austin, where where she earned degrees in natural science (BS, Zoology) and liberal arts (BA, Plan II.)
She then moved to Berkeley, CA to start graduate studies in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. She did her thesis research in the laboratory of Wilhelm Gruissem (before he moved to Zürich) and received her Ph.D. degree in 1996. At that time, she became fascinated with the idea of using computers to do biology research, and spent the next few years auditing (and sometimes officially enrolling in) computer science classes at Berkeley. She also worked part-time as a researcher for The DNA Files, award-winning public radio documentaries on genetics.
After learning Java, Scheme, and a bit of C, she joined the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, based in Gerald Rubin's lab, as a postdoctoral trainee. For a year she worked on developing programming skills, writing Java visualization applets for the Project Web site, and then re-joined the group as a Staff Programmer/Analyst. In 1999, she joined Neomorphic Software, a bioinformatics company started by BDGP colleagues Cyrus Harmon, Gregg Helt, and Martin Reese. After Affymetrix purchased the company in 2000, she continued at Affymetrix as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Gene Characterization Group, led by Michael Siani-Rose, who later co-founded Theregen, Inc., a SF Bay Area biotechnology company. As a Bioinformatics Scientist at Affymetrix, she contributed to several projects and published articles on alternative splicing, genome data visualization, and expression microarray annotation.
In 2004, Dr. Loraine returned to academia as an assistant professor in Biostatistics and Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. At UAB, she did research and taught in the Section on Statistical Genetics in the School of Public Health.
In 2008, she joined UNC Charlotte as an Associate Professor in the Bioinformatics Research Center, which soon after became the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, within the UNC Charlotte College of Computing and Informatics.
The Loraine lab is located at the North Carolina Research Campus, in the Plants for Human Health Institute.