The Parker laboratory uses an integrative research approach in the general fields of computational biology and functional genomics. The major goal of the lab is to generate mechanistic knowledge about how disease susceptibility is encoded in the non-coding portion of the genome, with a focus on type 2 diabetes. We accomplish this through an interdisciplinary combination of molecular/cellular and computational approaches. Specifically, we generate multiple high-throughput data sets on the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and proteome across species and in disease-relevant tissues/cells and use computational approaches to integrate and analyze this data. Looking forward, our belief is that these high-throughput biological profiling and analysis approaches will be closely tied to disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment—and will therefore have a tremendous influence on medicine.