Bioinformatics David Reif
Professor, Biological Sciences and Statistics
David Reif joined North Carolina State University in 2013 as part of the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program. He is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences (formerly Department of Genetics), a resident member of the Bioinformatics Research Center, director of the Bioinformatics Consulting and Service Core, director of the Data Management and Analysis Core of the Superfund Research Center, and co-director of the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core of the Center for Human Health and the Environment. Reif serves as associate editor (formerly managing editor) for Environmental Health Perspectives and BioData Mining and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology and Frontiers in Toxicology. He teaches courses on statistical programming, bioinformatics, computational toxicology, and environmental health science.
The overarching goal of the Reif Lab is to understand the complex interactions between human health and the environment through the integrated analysis of high-dimensional data from diverse sources. To accomplish this goal, the lab focuses on analytical/visual methods development, experimental design, and software implementation to distill useful information from epidemiological studies of human health, high-throughput screening of environmental chemicals, and model organism data. Lab members include students from several degree programs as well as postdoctoral and senior scientists.
Reif’s efforts in research, teaching, and outreach have been recognized with several honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by the White House as the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. He has also been selected to serve on expert committees, including those for the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Reif earned his Bachelor of Science in biology, with a minor in finance, from the College of William and Mary, where he was a Monroe Scholar. He earned his Master of Science in applied statistics and Ph.D. in human genetics from Vanderbilt University, under the mentorship of Jason H. Moore. Upon graduation, Reif came to the U.S. EPA as a postdoc under Elaine Cohen Hubal. Prior to joining NC State, Reif was a principal investigator with the U.S. EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology, where he led several statistical/bioinformatical efforts at the Agency and collaborated on a variety of projects with the ToxCast and Tox21 consortia.
