I am interested in developing and applying computational algorithms/pipelines to analyze/integrate genomics and next-generation sequencing (NGS) data and to provide a better understanding of molecular mechanisms and biological processes that underlie the development and diseases. I have more than 10 years of research experience in computational biology, including a Master?s degree and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics. Being a master student, I worked with a group of biologists and computer scientists and constructed one of the earliest disease-related SNP microarray databases and developed related analysis tools. After that, I went to Norway to study transcriptional regulation using the comparative genomics approach in Dr. Lenhard's group. I discovered a list of enhancer-like regions coupled in the coding exons, which had largely expanded the sequence space to look for long-range regulatory elements. I also developed web resources such as Synorth to facilitate the study of the evolution of genomic regulatory blocks among vertebrates. In my postdoctoral period in UMMS, I am active in the international ENCODE consortium where I built a model to study the correlation between gene expression and various chromatin modifications in the aspect of different cellular contexts by integrating ChIP-Seq, RNA-Seq, RNA-PET, CAGE, and genomics data. I also had fun in the world of small RNA, esp. piRNA and miRNA, in studying their roles in spermatogenesis in mice and in skeletal muscle atrophy and death in the moth. After that, I switched to work in human neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease using clinical samples and next-generation sequencing techniques.
Specialties: Knowledge in bioinformatics, algorithm development, data integration, data visualization, parallel computing, statistics.
Bioinformatics: Comparative genomics, small RNA analysis, next-generation sequencing analysis (ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, smallRNA-seq, ChIA-PET, RNA-PET, CAGE, PAS-seq etc.)