Wei Zhang, Director of the Center for Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology, Hanes and Willis Family Professor in Cancer at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Remembering Distinguished Professor Ed Dougherty
I had one of the worst nights of sleep, absorbing the news that my dear friend and colleague, Distinguished Professor Ed Dougherty of Texas A and M University, died two days ago. The news arrived via Ed’s email from his wife. At first, I thought Ed wanted to talk about a brilliant new idea that had just come to him, so the actual message was a profound shock.
Ed and I first started working together toward the end of the last century. In the early days of cancer genomics, we faced many challenging problems. Bioinformatics was greatly lacking, and there were very few bioinformatics scientists. Jeff Trent, then the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), recommended Ed Dougherty to our Cancer Genomics Program at MD Anderson.
Ed’s influence was already apparent through his network: his former student, Yidong Chen, was the chief bioinformatician in Jeff’s group, and Seungchan Kim, a leader in computational biology at Prairie View A and M, was working towards his PhD under Ed.
In those early days, when cell phones and social media were not commonplace, finding old photos was a challenge. I managed to uncover this historic photo, taken sometime around the end of 2000, during one of the visits by Ed, Yidong, and Seungchan.
Also pictured was the outstanding statistician Ken Hess, who sadly passed away a few years ago from stomach cancer. Ken worked on many early genomic studies and coauthored numerous papers with me.
We were also joined by Keith Beggarly, the always sharp-eyed statistician who had just joined our program from Rice University. Keith later established himself as a leader in forensic bioinformatics, teaching us all to be super careful in data management.
In the front row, Latha Ramdas made tremendous contributions to the data management for our microarray construction. Jing Wang, in the second row, also joined our group as a biophysicist and is now a Professor of Bioinformatics at MD Anderson.
Who knew that our early meetings with Ed and his team started something that has kept growing over the last 25 years—not just in scientific breakthroughs, but also in the academic career development of so many individuals?
Ed, you did your job well, and we all miss you tremendously!”
More posts featuring Wei Zhang.