Assessing the impact of human variation on protein structure, dynamics, function and disease, and the dependence of variant impact on environment and genetic context.

My research team develops and applies both experimental and computational technology, launching spectacular multidisciplinary scientists.  The lab’s primary research focus is on generating comprehensive experimental maps of functional sequence variation (‘variant effect maps’) and establishing their clinical utility. To date, we have generated variant effect maps for over 20 human proteins, using highly-multiplexed cell-based assays (often under multiple environments, genetic contexts or using distinct functional assays). For each of these projects, there is a major computational modeling component, e.g. molecular dynamics. We also developed VARITY, among the current top predictors of pathogenicity for rare human missense variants. Another focus with both experimental and computational aspects is the systematic discovery of protein interactions, applying massively-multiplexed interaction assays enabled by next-generation sequencing under different interaction conditions to understand the regulated dynamics of protein interaction.

Education

1986 – 1990  Univ. of California, Berkeley, BA 1990, Physics and Molecular & Cell Biology

1992 – 1998 Harvard University, PhD 1998, Biophysics

Dr. Chris Sander’s group at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda)

Department of Computational and Systems Biology
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
3420 Forbes Avenue, Murdoch Bldg Rm 835
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Office: 412-648-3333
fritz@pitt.edu

Website link: https://rothlab.csb.pitt.edu/