Dr. Fritz Roth

Biography

Fritz Roth is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research employs computational large-scale experimental approaches to measure the functional impacts of human sequence variation and to map dynamic protein-protein interactions. Dr. Roth leads a team that develops and applies experimental computational genomic technologies, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration. A significant focus of his lab is on generating comprehensive experimental maps of functional sequence variations, with the goal of establishing their clinical utility, commonly referred to as variant effect maps. His computational efforts revolve around variant effect mapping, including methodologies for imputing missing data and estimating the uncertainty of variant impact scores. Furthermore, the lab is dedicated to maintaining an international community platform for coordinating variant effect mapping projects, continually developing VARITY, a leading supervised pathogenicity predictor for rare human missense variants. Experimentally, they are expanding their work on variant effect maps in human proteins, leveraging humanized yeast and human cell model systems, while also investigating the environment context-dependency of these variant effects. His work additionally focuses on the systematic discovery of protein interactions using massively multiplexed interaction assays and next-generation sequencing techniques.

Research Interests