RNA CoMPASS: RNA Comprehensive Multi-Processor Analysis System for Sequencing

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I want to thank my advisor Dr. Christopher Taylor. His endless support and wisdom helped me finish this dissertation. His enthusiasm for Bioinformatics was contagious—and I definitely caught it. His depth of knowledge and very precise academic guidance brought me to develop a web-based GUI distributed computational pipeline, which provides all-in-one functionality including human transcriptome quantification, other typical endogenous RNA-Sequencing analysis and additionally the investigation of exogenous sequences. I would like to thank Dr. Erik Flemington. The major experiment data and biology knowledge were provided by his lab. I really appreciate his consistent support. I express my deep gratitude to all the professors in my dissertation committee for their precious suggestions about my Ph.D. research and valuable comments on my dissertation. I wish to thank our bioinformatics group members: Mohamad Qayoom and Joseph Coco and Carl Baribault and Dr. Zhu Dongxiao's lab. Each individual provided insights that guided and challenged my thinking, substantially improved the dissertation. I am grateful to Dr. Mahdi Abdelguerfi who cared much about my research and my family during the period of my Ph.D. study. Lastly, I would like to thank my family members, especially my wife Yan Gao, for supporting and encouraging me to pursue this degree. Without my wife's encouragement, I would not have finished this work.