Jennifer S. Labus, Ph.D.

Director, Bioinformatics

Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics Core

Member, Brain Research Institute

Adjunct Associate Professor, Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases

Biography

Dr. Labus is an Adjunct Professor in the Division of Digestive Diseases in the Department of Medicine at UCLA. She is the director for the Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics Core in the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress at UCLA. She is also a director of the Bioinformatics Core at the UCLA Microbiome Center. She has made seminal contributions to mapping neural networks underlying visceral pain and elucidating brain-gut –microbiome axis in humans. She was the recipient of the 2011 Master’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic or Clinical Digestive Sciences, American Gastroenterology Association.

Currently her research is focused on determining biological markers (e.g., microbiome, metabolomics, cytokines, and microRNA) of disease, including chronic pain, obesity, systemic sclerosis, and sickle-cell disease.  Using state-or-the-art computational, biostatistical, and bioinformatics approaches, she assesses the interaction between various levels of biological data (e.g. microbiota, metabolites, immune markers, multimodal brain imaging data) with clinical data. The overall goal of this systems-based approach is to identify and target the key regulators of multi’omics-biological disease-interaction networks in order to understand the pathophysiological mechanisms and provide new targets for treatment. She has expertise  in bioinformatics and biostatistics with expertise in multimodal brain imaging, microbiome, metabolomics, systems biology, machine learning, network analysis,  and treatment-outcome research.

Dr Labus has been the recipient of a K08 Career Development award, Effective connectivity of central response in irritable bowel disorder, from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). She currently  serves as the primary investigator on two grants funded by the National Institute of Childhood Health and Human Development (NICHD) : R01HD076756 Profiling vulvodynia subtypes based on neurobiological and behavioral endophenotypes and R21HD086737-01 Deriving novel biomarkers of localized provoked vulvodynia through metabolomics: A biological system based approach.