BICB Colloquium: Shijia Zhu

Dr. Shijia Zhu is presenting as part of the nomination process for new BICB faculty. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Medical School.

Title

Abstract

Dr. Zhu integrates diverse multi-omics data in his studies, including the spatial transcriptomics, Pacbio SMRT-seq long read, and traditional bulk sequencing technologies. Meanwhile, he designed the novel computational methods of multi-omics data analysis tailored for disease studies. In this presentation, he will talk about how to align the spot-level spatial transcriptomics to the nuclear morphology to achieve the single-cell level spatial data analysis, therefore enabling the real cell-cell interaction in disease tissues rather than the current spot-spot interaction. In addition, he will talk about how to combine the long read and short read sequencing to accurately characterize the pathogenic alternative splicing isoforms, which further contribute to the novel therapeutic strategy. Last, he will talk about how to screen the disease driving factors from a very small sample size via aggregating the downstream targets to minimize the false positives and improve the discovery power.

Biography

In 2012, Dr. Zhu obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Bioinformatics from Harbin Institute of Technology, in China. He designed the novel methods of regulatory network among epigenetic marker, gene expression and alternative splicing. In 2013-2017, he did his postdoc at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, at New York. During this period, he was working on the Pacbio SMRT-seq to study both novel form of DNA methylation in the eukaryotes genome and the alternative splicing isoforms. Since 2018, he is a research-track Assistant Professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He is utilizing multi-omics data to study the digestive liver disease and liver cancer.