Zhen Lin

The rapid pace of scientific progress requires the free availability of scientific data. Unfortunately, in the case of clinical and biological data, this is at odds with the patients need for privacy. Large-scale, comprehensive biomedical datasets generated rapidly by high-throughput methods have posed non-intuitive and difficult challenges for protecting privacy and information security. A current focus of the Lin lab is to investigate novel algorithms to address the privacy and confidentiality issues that revolve around scientific data sharing. Understanding the risks of disclosing individuals based on different types of genetic data and identifying factors that affect such risks will shed light on how to protect patient privacy with both computational approaches and social solutions.

Lin Z, Altman RB, and Owen AB, Letter: Confidentiality in genome research. (2006) Science 313(5786):441-2.

Phuong TM, Lin Z, and Altman RB, Choosing SNPs using feature selection. (2005) The IEEE Computer Society Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference. Aug 8-11, Stanford, CA;301-309. [J Bioinform Comput Biol. 2006 4(2):241-57].

Lin Z and Altman RB (2004) Finding haplotype tagging SNPs by use of principal components analysis. Am J Hum Genet 75(5):850-61.

Lin Z, Owen AB, and Altman RB (2004) Genomic research and human subject privacy. Science. 305(5681):183. [Altman RB, Lin Z, and Owen AB, (2005) Author Reply: Protecting privacy of human subjects. Science 307(5713):1200].

Lin Z, Hewett M, and Altman RB. (2002) Using binning to maintain confidentiality of medical data. Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, San Antonio, TX, pp. 454-8.

Klein TE, Chang JT, Cho MK, Easton KL, Fergerson R, Hewett M, Lin Z, Liu Y, Liu S, Oliver DE, Rubin DL, Shafa F, Stuart JM, and Altman RB. (2001) Integrating genotype and phenotype information: an overview of the PharmGKB project. Pharmacogenetics Research Network and Knowledge Base. Pharmacogenomics J 1(3):167-70.