Dr. Frederick P. Roth

Dr. Frederick (Fritz) Roth is an inaugural Canada Excellence Research Chair in Integrative Biology and a Senior Investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. Known worldwide for his work in computational biology and genomics, Dr. Roth is jointly appointed at the University of Toronto's Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research.

Dr. Roth completed his PhD in biophysics at Harvard University in 1998, after studying both physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent position before joining the Lunenfeld was at Harvard Medical School, where he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.

His research focuses on developing technologies to more efficiently relate genes to the functioning of living systems and human diseases. These new technologies will accelerate researchers' studies of genes, their functions and how these functions interact to form living systems.

Building on their previous work in experimental and computational genomics, Dr. Roth's team will collaborate with other Lunenfeld researchers in the Systems Biology group to develop new technologies for revealing gene functions, the pathways they encode and how these genes and pathways are related to human diseases. Dr. Roth's group is harnessing “next generation†DNA sequencing technologies to systematically measure the effects of multiple genetic changes, and to map protein interactions.

Large-scale experimentation on biological model systems by Dr. Roth and others in the Systems Biology group is uncovering fundamental aspects of protein, cell and organismal function to better understand human health and disease.

Early work by Dr. Roth demonstrated that DNA sequence elements controlling genes can be automatically discovered using large-scale measurements of the levels at which genes are activated.

His group has extensively studied the networks of interactions between proteins in yeast, worms, plants and humans. More recently, Dr. Roth's team has computationally prioritized candidate disease genes so that researchers can focus efforts on the genes most likely to impact human health.