Contact
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Ann Loraine, Ph.D. Associate Professor Bioinformatics Research Center University of North Carolina at Charlotte North Carolina Research Campus 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 Zurich) 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 a public radio documentary series called The DNA Files, which eventually won a Peabody Award for Excellence in Radio Journalism.
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 honing her 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 now-defunct Gene Characterization Group, led by Michael Siani-Rose, who since then has 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 early 2008, she joined UNC Charlotte as an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics with the Bioinformatics Research Center and the College of Computing and Informatics. At UNC Charlotte, she is building a combined computational and experimental biology group at the North Carolina Research Campus, now under construction in Kannapolis, North Carolina.