Winston Hide, Ph.D.

Winston Hide, Ph.D.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Winston Hide photo credit Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

The Hide lab develops and performs data-driven systems approaches to disease causal discovery, using what they learn to prioritize drug/targets combinations.

Understanding development arising from stem cells using molecular profiles like gene expression microarray, genome wide methylation marks, RNASeq, and histone mark dynamics is currently our state of the art. All of these approaches measure a single dimension of molecular event. How can this be translated to how the cell is functioning at the developmental time point, and how can this be compared between experiments that are using different platforms, cell types, and whatever else?

We need to figure out what the overall functional state of the cell is at the developmental snapshot we are taking. If we can do that then its possible to compare functional states – which are made up of the sum of the assay activities we are performing already, and draw the conclusions accordingly.

Gene Discovery

We apply systematic organizing approaches to data from the genome, transcriptomics, protein-protein interaction and gene regulation and so reveal critical processes that protect against the onset of neurodegeneration.

Biosketch

Winston Hide is co-Director of the Non-Coding RNA Precision Diagnostics and Therapeutics Core Facility at BIDMC, which performs specialized bioinformatics for interpretation of ncRNA discoveries for delivery novel RNA therapeutics. 

Hide performed his post-doctoral training at the University of Texas, Houston, Baylor College of Medicine and the Smithsonian Institution Natural History Museum. He gained industry experience in Silicon Valley at the MasPar Computer Corporation as director of genomics and founded the South African National Bioinformatics Institute where he co-authored the South African Government Biotechnology Strategy. He won the Oppenheimer Foundation Distinguished Sabbatical Research Fellowship in 2007. Dr. Hide was elected into the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2007. He was also the first recipient of the “International Society for Computational Biology Award for Outstanding Achievement”— an award given in recognition of his work for the development of computational biology and bioinformatics in Africa. 

Hide was the Professor and Chair of computational biology, Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience and Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the founding director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics.

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