Personnel

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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Haibo Liu obtained his B.S. in Biotechnology and M.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Huazhong Agricultural University, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He obtained his first Ph.D. in Genetics from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese  Academy of Sciences in 2005, accomplishing a major project—Construction  of a high-quality sheep genomic Bacterial Artificial Chromosome library and physical map of the MHC regions. From 2005 to 2011, he did his post-doc in Howard Hughes Medical Institute (University of Colorado at Boulder), working on vulval development by establishing and using ChIP-on-chip in C. elegans, and UMass Chan Medical School, working on aging in C. elegans. He obtained his second Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Iowa State University (2012-2017), where his research focused on pig transcriptomics. He worked as Bioinformatician III for MCCB from 2017 to 2018. Then he went back to Iowa State University as an Associate Scientist, working on the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) project. He rejoined MCCB in 2020 as a Bioinformatician III, focusing on NGS data analysis, and package development.

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Rui Li obtained his B.S. in Biotechnology and M.A. in Preventive Vet. Med. from Nanjing Agricultural University, in 2010 and 2012. He obtained his Ph.D. in Animal Sciences from Washington State University in 2016, working with whole transcript termini sequencing and 3’UTR annotation of X. tropicalis. From 2016 to 2018, he was a post-doc in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Idaho, working on the imputation of missing values in single-cell RNA-seq data with machine learning techniques. He joined MCCB in summer 2018. Since then, he has worked on data analysis, genome annotation, and package development.

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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 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.

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