Vance Lemmon is the program director for  IDSC’s Computational Biology focus area.  He holds the Walter G. Ross Distinguished Chair in Developmental Neuroscience at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and is a Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of Miami. He also is an associate member of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.

Dr. Lemmon joined the Miami Project in 2003.  He collaborates with Prof. John Bixby, and uses High Content Analysis to screen drug, compound and cDNA libraries for perturbagens that can enhance nerve regeneration after injury to the central nervous system.   Recent publications describing this work have appeared in Science (2009, 2011) and PNAS (2102).  The LemBix group uses the University’s HPC resources to analyze next generation sequencing data and run support vector machine algorithms on data from kinase inhibitor experiments.  The later project is done in collaboration with Stephan Schürer, program director of IDSC’s Drug Discovery focus area.

Dr. Lemmon is currently involved in informatics projects to describe high throughput screening data; the BioAssay Ontology Project, the LINCS Information FramEwork and the RegenBase Project.  These NIH supported projects facilitate interrogation of massive and diverse data sets emerging from NIH and academic screening centers.

Previously he was a Professor of Neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University for 15 years and the University of Pittsburgh for 5 years.  During that time his work focused on neural cell adhesion molecules and brain development.   He received his Ph.D. in Anatomy from Emory University in 1978 and was a post-doc at Washington University in St. Louis.  In his spare time he rides a skateboard and a bicycle.