Speakers: Toni Kazic

Toni Kazic

Associate Professor
University of Missouri

 

Toni Kazic is a computational biologist who has grown a research crop of maize for over a decade. She is an associate professor in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri; and a member of the MU Informatics Institute, the Missouri Maize Center, the Interdisciplinary Plant Group, and the Genetics Area Program there. Her research focusses on the inference and analysis of biological networks using mathematical and computational methods, most recently using a set of 55 maize mutants and their complex phenotypes as an experimental system. Equally important, she is interested in the mechanisms underlying these and other complex phenotypes, and how this information could be used to accelerate crop improvement. The need to quantitatively and repeatedly characterize large numbers of mutant plants in the field has led her to initiate work on high throughput phenotyping using aerial imagery. Her previous work included studies on the representation of information on biochemical structures, reactions, and networks; formal methods for representing the semantics of biological data and computation; and interfaces for community annotation of biochemical information.