Events

Talk Title: Secure Federated Genomics

Abstract: The sensitive nature of genomic data poses significant challenges for data sharing and collaboration in biomedicine. Traditional safeguards, such as access control mechanisms, often result in data fragmentation across silos, hindering large-scale analysis. In this talk, I will describe our work on secure federated (SF) algorithms, which leverage cryptography, statistical genetics, and distributed computing to enable collaborative genomic research without compromising privacy. I will showcase practical tools we have developed for key analysis tasks, including genome-wide association studies (GWAS), principal component analysis (PCA), and relatedness detection. Finally, I will discuss our recent efforts to deploy these methods across biobanks and explore the role of privacy technologies in advancing biomedical data science.

Bio: Hyunghoon (Hoon) Cho, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. He holds a secondary appointment in Computer Science. Previously, he was a Schmidt Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2019 and previously obtained both M.S. and B.S. with Honors in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award.