Jinze Liu, Ph.D., joins the department as a professor. Her primary research interests lie in the areas of machine learning and computational biology, with an overarching goal in developing accurate and efficient bioinformatics methods to enable the interpretation of high throughput -omics data. Dr. Liu’s lab has developed and released a suite of robust and scalable bioinformatics tools for ab initio RNA-seq analysis as well as screening methods over large-scale sequencing databases. These tools are freely accessible to the research community.
Through collaborative research, the bioinformatics tools developed at Dr. Liu’s lab have enabled a broad range of biomedical applications, including the identification of biomarkers critical to equine cartilage disease, the characterization of ancient ALU species pertinent to macular degenerative disease, and the discovery of aberrant RNAs such as gene fusions and circular RNAs arising from cancer transcriptomes.
Dr. Liu also serves as the director of the Bioinformatics core at the Massey Cancer Center (MCC), with a mission to provide a comprehensive, high quality and cost-efficient Bioinformatics service infrastructure to accelerate cancer research through collaborative interactions with MCC researchers.