Bioinformatics Core Personnel
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Lihua Julie Zhu, PhD, Professor, Head of Bioinformatics Core
Lihua Julie Zhu obtained her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, and her M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University in Chicago in 2001. Prior to joining UMass Chan in 2007, she served as Director of the Bioinformatics Consulting Group and Director of the Clinical Informatics Group at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Her work is devoted to the understanding of gene regulation and cancer biology, biomarker discovery, and development and application of gene editing technology by mining and integrating various high-throughput datasets. Her expertise is algorithm and computational tool development. Her group has developed more than a dozen packages with various utilities such as gRNA design, machine learning application, peak calling, motif alignment, quality assessment, annotation, data integration and visualization.
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Junhui Li, MA, Bioinformatician
Junhui Li obtained his B.S. in Tea Science from Anhui Agricultural University in 2012 and M.A. in Biostatistics and Quantitative Genetics from China Agricultural University in 2015, focusing on pleiotropic quantitative trait locus map and the development of the R package JM4QTN. Since 2015, he has been working on the analysis of GWAS, QTL mapping, RNA-seq, DNA-seq, and exon-seq. He published four R packages including StepReg, gtWAS, TmCalculator, and ProbeDeveloper. He joined MCCB in November 2020 as a Bioinformatician II, working on NGS data analysis, Rshiny, and package development.
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Kai Hu, PhD, Bioinformatician
Kai Hu received his B.S. in Biological Sciences from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2013. He then obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences from Pennsylvania State University in 2019. By leveraging bioinformatics and biochemistry, his thesis work led to the discovery of a novel metal-free class Ie Ribonucleotide Reductase (RNR). Kai's current work includes bioinformatics analysis/consulting for various data types and developing novel computational tools. Kai is also a fan of website development, database management, and machine learning. During his spare time, he enjoys being a quiet angler, a fossil hunter, and a gardener.