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Inimary Toby, PhD

Associate Professor, Biology

Office: Haggerty Science Center #141

Office Hours: M 2:15-3:15 p.m. or by Appointment

Dr Toby holds a doctorate in Biomedical Sciences from Ohio State University, College of Medicine. Her postdoctoral training was in Functional Genomics at the FAA-Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City. Dr Toby went on to work as a Staff Scientist specializing in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC). While at OUHSC, she also organized materials for bioinformatics educational programs as part of a National Institute of Health-INBRE grant. Prior to coming to UD, Dr Toby worked for several years on an NIH-funded project as a Senior Scientist (specializing in Computational Biology) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In addition to her research work, she delivered training workshops, webinars and nanocourses as part of the project. During that time, she served as a contributing scientist to help establish standard practices for data reporting and data analysis of immune repertoire sequence data. Dr Toby has more than 15 years experience as a scientist and has taught courses at several institutions. She enjoys mentoring undergraduate students and is very active in regional and national scientific societies. Dr Toby's research program at UD is focused on cell signaling consequences that occur at the cellular/molecular interface of lung diseases. She is also leveraging the use of computational methods to assess immune sequencing and other types of high throughput sequencing data as a means to better understand human diseases.

Education

B.A, Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, College Scholars Honors Program, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee

PhD, Biomedical Sciences, Concentrations: Cell/Organ Systems Biology and Translational Research, The Ohio State University, College of Medicine, Columbus, Ohio

Certificate in Biostatistics and Epidemiological Methods, The Ohio State University, College of Medicine, Columbus, Ohio

Certificate in Translational Research, The Ohio State University, College of Medicine, Columbus, Ohio

Areas of Expertise

Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Systems Biology and Comparative Genomics

Recent Courses

BIO3V41 Bioinformatics
BIO2318 Forensic Biology
BIO4360 Biology Literature
BIO2315 Human Biology
BIO3345 Biostatistics
Summer program in Bioinformatics at Sapienza University of Rome

Dr Toby's Biostatistics and Bioinformatics courses also utilize a GitHub account to archive past projects from students that have taken her Biostatistics and Bioinformatics courses and wish to archive these for long term reference. These websites can be accessed below:

UD Biostatistics GitHub

UD Bioinformatics Github

Research Interests

Dr Toby's lab utilizes cell culture models, biochemical assays, immune sequencing and other types of high throughput sequencing technologies to better understand cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Her lab focuses on understanding basic mechanisms of cell signaling as well as generating sequence level data and applying machine learning methods to derive meaningful biological information.

This video below provides a brief introduction to the immune sequencing technology platform:

The following videos below are from Dr Toby’s research work (narrated by Dr Toby) detailing how to analyze immune sequence data derived from the immune sequencing platform (as described in the intro to immune sequence video):

A brief introduction to the VDJServer website for immune sequence data analysis:

Metadata video showing how to organize the metadata and upload it into the VDJServer website:

How to generate and view pretty graphs/charts on the vdjserver website following analysis of immune sequence data; the video also shows how a user can download these files for later use.

Selected Publications

A full list of scientific publications from Dr Toby’s research work over the years can be accessed here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=inimary+toby

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