Feb 2023: Our SLE genetic risk prediction and drug repurposing work is published in Nature Communications (link). Congratulations to Poom, who led the project. The work is jointly supervised with Bibo Jiang and Alex Tsoi.

Jan 2023: Our multi-ancestry TWAS methodology paper describing the TESLA method is published Nature Genetics (link). Penn State News featured our article. Congratulations to Fang and Xingyan who led the project. The work is jointly supervised with Bibo Jiang and Scott Vrieze.

Dec 2022: Our addiction genetics paper was published in Nature (link). Lab trainees Fang, Xingyan, and Chen are co-first authors of the work. We are grateful for all the wonderful collaborators from GSCAN consortium. A few media outlets reported our work, including Daily Mail, New Scientist, GenomeWeb, Nature Asia. We also wrote a companion research briefing for Nature.

Oct 2022: Congratulations to Xingyan Wang, who successfully defended his PhD thesis today. Xingyan is a highly productive student and made numerous contributions to our research projects in statistical genetics and addiction genetics. During his tenure in the group, Xingyan has been first authors on multiple high-impact publications, including one in Nature and one in Nature Genetics. We wish Xingyan all the best in his future academic endeavors!

July 2022: Our work that uses deep learning (contrastive learning) to enhance risk prediction models based on microbiome and metabolomics data is published in the Journal of Molecular Biology (link). This is joint work with Xiaowei Zhan’s group at UTSW. This work is also featured in Penn State News and Penn State Health News.

June 2022: Our work that integrates 3D genome and epigenetic data to model gene expression and identify repurposable drug for treating human diseases is published in Nature Communications (link). The work is also featured in Penn State News and Penn State Health News. Congratulations to Poom who led the work and all who contributed! This work is jointly supervised with Bibo Jiang.

June 2022: Our work on genetic risk scores for autoimmune diseases is published in Frontiers in Immunology (link). We reviewed the current progress in genetic risk scores and discussed their utility when used with conventional lab tests. The work is led by MD/PhD students Poom and Havell!.

June 2022: Keenan Anderson-Fears won the prestigious Gina M. Finzi fellowship from the Lupus Foundation of America. Congratulations to Keenan! Here is the news story featuring Keenan’s award in Penn State News and Penn State Health News

May 2022: Dajiang is promoted to Full Professor (starting July 1st, 2022).

April 2022: Congratulations to Poom who successfully defended his PhD thesis. Poom is our 7th PhD graduate and the first graduate from MD/PhD program. During his stay in the lab, Poom made numerous contributions to our functional genomics and translational work. He led the development of PUMICE, which integrates epigenetics and 3D genome data to improve TWAS, and applied the methods to drug repurposing. He also led our research projects in lupus genetics. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

March 2022: Xingyan Wang, PhD student in biostatistics from the lab was celebrated as a student leader by the Penn State College of Medicine! (news link)

Sept 2021: Congratulations to Lina Yang, who successfully defended her PhD thesis. Lina is our 6th PhD graduate from the lab. During Lina’s tenure in the group, she developed SEQMINER2 software for querying biobank scale datasets, which formed the basis for many of our projects, and she also led the development of methods for polygenic risk score in multi-ethnic populations. We wish Lina all the best in her future endeavor!

Sept 2021: Penn State News and Penn State Health News featured Chen’s work, which was selected as a semi-finalist for the Charles P. Epstein Trainees Award from the American Society of Human Genetics.

Sept 2021: Dajiang gave a colloquium talk on the use of social media and interaction platforms for enhancing trainee-mentor feedback loops at the Woodward Center for Excellence in Health Sciences Education.

Sept 2021: Penn State News featured our new work in the functional genomics of X chromosome inactivation and sex biased diseases. (link)

Aug 2021: Congratulations to Jordan Hughey for successfully defending his PhD thesis. Jordan is our first graduate from the Bioinformatics and Genomics graduate program. During his tenure in my group, Jordan has won numerous awards including the NSF Graduate Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Minority Fellowship, and the Human Genetics Scholar award. He has been a tremendous contributor to our group and the graduate program. We wish Jordan all the best for his endeavor in his future career.

Jordan with his committee members: first row: Dr. Broach, Dajiang, Dr. Girirajan; second row: Dr. Mahony and Jordan.

Aug 2021: Our paper on methods to infer genes that escape X chromosome inactivation is published in Genome Research (link). This is the first of our series of new work in the area of the functional genomics for the X chromosome. Work led by recent PhD graduate Renan Sauteraud and jointly supervised with Dr. Laura Carrel.

May 2021: Congratulations to Renan Sauteraud for successfully defending his PhD thesis! He spearheaded our projects in the functional genomics for the X chromosome and has done a great job. During his tenure in the group, he has been an extremely important contributor to our various projects and a great colleague. In addition to his thesis work, he also teamed up with other grad students and won a 3rd place in a Kaggle Data Mining challenge. We are grateful for Renan’s various contributions and wish him all the best for his future endeavors.

May 2021: The American Society of Human Genetics featured graduate student Jordan Hughey in their news, where Jordan talks about transitions from trainee to industry career (link).

May 2021: Congratulations to Dan McGuire for successfully defending his PhD thesis. Dan worked on a number of high quality projects going from methods for assessing replicability of GWAS studies to the analysis of EHR datasets. In addition to his thesis work, Dan is also part of a team that scored the 4th place in a Kaggle data mining challenge. We wish Dan all the best in his future endeavor!

Apr 2021: Dajiang won the Excellence in Career Mentoring Award (link), presented by the Woodward Center for Excellence in Health Sciences Education and the Office of Faculty and Professional Development at the Penn State College of Medicine.

Mar 2021: Our work on model-based assessment of replicability in genetic association meta-analysis has been published in Nature Communications (link)! Penn State News (link) and Academic Times (link) also reported our work. Congratulations to Dan who led the work, to Yu, Dylan, Scott Eckert, Lina and Fang who contributed and to Qunhua and Bibo who co-supervised. Joint work with Arthur, Scott Vrieze and the GSCAN consortium.

Mar 2021: Congratulations to Yuhuan for passing her MS thesis defense! Yuhuan is our first MS student from the Bioinformatics and Genomics Graduate Program. We look forward to seeing Yuhuan’s continued success in her next phase of the study.

Feb 2021: Dajiang became the Director of Bioinformatics and Genomics PhD/MS program at the Penn State College of Medicine.

Dec 2020: Congratulations to Dylan Weissenkampen for successfully defending his PhD thesis. Dylan is our first PhD student in Neuroscience, who brought much needed neuroscience expertise to many of our projects in the genetics of addiction. We wish Dylan all the best in his future endeavors!

July 2020: Congratulations to PhD student Jordan Hughey on being selected as a Human Genetics Scholar from the American Society of Human Genetics. Human Genetics Scholar Initiative is a major program at ASHG for the mission of promoting diversity in human genetics research. ASHG announcement is here. Penn State News is here .

July 2020: As summer wraps up, two more students in the group passed comprehensive exams, and officially become PhD candidate. Congrats to Xingyan and Scott!

July 2020: Our manuscript on seqminer2 for querying biobank scale dataset was accepted into Bioinformatics. PhD student Lina Yang was the first author. This work is in collaboration with Xiaowei Zhan from UTSW.

June 2020: Dajiang gave a keynote address on “A journey of enhancing trainee mentor feedback loops” at Data and Dine event for the Postdoc Society at Penn State College of Medicine

June 2020: Penn State Huck Institute featured Poom’s Finkelstein Research Award for research on autoimmune diseases (link)

June 2020: NIDA Notes featured our work on rare variants in addiction phenotypes. Congratulations to Yu and Jordan, who were co-first authors. (link).

May 2020: Congratulations to Yu Jiang for successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis. Yu is our first PhD graduate from the lab. During Yu’s stay in the team, she published four first-author papers, won a number of student awards and contributed to many of the lab’s projects. We wish Yu all the best for her future endeavors.

May 2020: paper on association and meta-analysis of multi-allelic variants was accepted into Genes. Congratulations to Yu and Xingyan!

May 2020: Congratulations to Keenan and Chen for joining the lab and passing the candidacy exams. Congratulations to Poom for passing the comprehensive exam!

Oct 2019: Group trainees Fang Chen and Xingyan Wang (on behalf of Yu Jiang) presented platform talks, and Dan McGuire presented reviews’ choice poster at ASHG in Houston.

Oct 2019, Graduate students Renan Sauteraud, Dylan Weissenkampen and Dan McGuire got Graduate Student Travel Award from Penn State College of Medicine.

Sept 2019: Ph.D. students Renan Sauteraud and Dan McGuire (along with Vishal Mydia) won 3rd place in Kaggle Big Data Competition. Penn State News Coverage is here (link)

June 2019: Congratulations to Xingyan for passing the candidacy exam with flying colors!

May 2019: Our exome chip meta-analysis paper for smoking and drinking addiction in Biological Psychiatry was chosen to be featured with a companion commentary (link)

May 2019: Dajiang was named the Outstanding Champion of Diversity in Research from the Penn State College of Medicine.

Apr 2019: Dajiang was interviewed by Grace Griffaton at local Fox43 TV news on our work for the genetics of addiction. Full TV news is here: link. Dajiang also appeared on ABC27 evening news to talk about the research.

Mar 2019: Dajiang received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Penn State College of Medicine!

Mar 2019: Our review paper on sequence-based association and fine mapping analysis was published (link)

Jan 2019: Our paper on the GWAS for smoking/drinking addiction is out at Nature Genetics. It represents a major focus for the lab. We identified >400 loci associated with smoking/drinking addictions, which provided a comprehensive catalog of potential causal genes for follow-up studies. Graduate student Yu Jiang is a co-first author, and Dajiang is a co-corresponding author. Additional participants in the lab include Fang Chen and Dan McGuire. Study is led by Scott Vrieze from University of Minnesota, with great contributions from GSCAN investigators.

Jan 2019: Our paper that combines the exome chip data from three consortia is out on Molecular Psychiatry (link). We identified 40 novel loci with coding variants for smoking addiction phenotypes. Dajiang is a corresponding author. Lab trainees Yu Jiang and Fang Chen participated. Great collaboration with Scott Vrieze, Martin Tobin and Joanna Howson’s group.

Dec 2018: Our manuscript for GSCAN exome chip meta-analysis was published in Biological Psychiatry (link). We fine mapped causal variants and elucidated genetic architecture for smoking and drinking  phenotypes. Dajiang is a co-corresponding author, and lab trainee Yu Jiang and Jordan Hughey are joint first authors.

Nov 2018: Lab trainee Jordan Hughey received Alfred P. Sloan Minority Graduate Fellowship. Kudos Jordan! (Press release from Huck Institute)

Nov 2018: Lab trainee Jordan Hughey gave presentations at Science Slam for Milton Hershey School students, and won the “most interesting talk” award.

Oct 2018: Lab trainees Yu Jiang and Dan McGuire presented research on fine mapping and biobank data analysis as platform talks at ASHG. Renan Sauteraud presented XCI and got reviewer’s choice poster.

July 2018: Kudos to Yu, Renan and Dan for passing their comprehensive exams!

July 2018: Our paper on proper conditional analysis is published in PLOS Genetics. Congratulations to Yu, Dan and Fang, as well as all of our collaborators on this project!

May 2018: Dajiang got promoted to Associate Professor, effective July 1st, 2018

Apr 2018: Thesis student Jordan Hughey was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! The Penn State News featured Jordan’s award (link).

Nov 2017, Dajiang was featured in the Rice Engineering School Alumni Spotlight. Very honored!

Oct 2017, two large scale meta-analyses with the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium were published in Nature Genetics, i.e. GLGC paper, and Asian Lipids paper . Dajiang is the first author on the GLGC paper.

Feb 2017, A series of collaborative papers were published in Nature, Annals of Neurology, which used our softwares RAREMETAL/RVTESTS.

Sept 2016, Dajiang visited the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute and gave a seminar talk on efficient methods for biobank scale data analysis.

July 2016: Paper on the genetics of platelet related traits published on AJHG. This is a collaboration with the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium.

Summer 2016: Dajiang visited a number of universities including Shanghai Jiaotong Univ. Shanghai Finance and Economics Univ. and Sun Yat-Sen Univ., and gave a series of talks on lab research.

May 2016: We got an NIH R01 award to develop meta-analysis methods for sequence-based association studies. Dajiang is the PI. We will collaborate with colleagues in CU Boulder and UTSW in this project.

May 2016 Dajiang won the Penn State College of Medicine Distinguished Early Stage Investigator Award.

Apr 2016: First year research student Yu Jiang was awarded a scholarship to attend the Summer Institute of Statistical Genetics at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Feb 2016: Paper “RVTESTS: An Efficient and Comprehensive Tool for Rare Variant Association Analysis Using Sequence Data” accepted for publication in Bioinformatics. Dajiang is a corresponding author. This is in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University and A9.com.

Jan 2016: Paper “Rare Variant in Scavenger Receptor BI Raises HDL Cholesterol and Increases Risk of Coronary Heart Disease” accepted for publication in Science. Dajiang is a co-author. This is a collaboration with the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium and the Rader Lab in UPenn.

Oct 2015: Dajiang moderated a statistical genetics session of platform talks at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting at Baltimore, MD. 

Sept 2015: Our R21 to study the genetic basis of nicotine addiction is awarded by NIDA. Dajiang is the PI. We will be collaborating with colleagues at the Penn State TCORS, University of Nevada, University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to resolve the genetic mystery of nicotine addiction.

July 2015: Our manuscript for SEQMINER was published in Genetic Epidemiology. Dajiang is a co-corresponding author. This is joint work with Dr. Xiaowei Zhan at UTSW.

July 2015: Dajiang gave a talk at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

May 2015: GSCAN grant was scored 20 and 3% and funded by NIDA. Dajiang is the site PI at Penn State. We will be collaborating with colleagues at CU Boulder, and worldwide to study the genetics of smoking and drinking addiction using a meta-analysis approach.