Xiaoling Zhang

Dr. Xiaoling Zhang is an Associate Professor of Medicine in Biomedical Genetics at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine . She seeks to discover genetic risk factors of complex human diseases, and further to identify their underlying functional mechanisms. She received her doctorate in Bioinformatics from Boston University and her Master’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo. After being trained in epidemiology genetics and genomics at the NIH-NHLBI Framingham Heart Study, she is actively pursuing the driving force of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and its shared genetic structure and functional pathways with other diseases including cardiometabolic disorders and some type of cancers by integrating genome-wide DNA & RNA sequencing and a variety of functional genomic data.

Her primary research interests focus on: 1) develop methods for analyzing large-scale genetics and genomics data including microarray, genotype and next-generation sequencing data; 2) discover common, low-frequency and rare variants associated with complex diseases and their risk factors; 3) identify and prioritize putative causal genetic variants by integrative genomics study that involves combining biological information from a wide-range of data resources with eQTL analysis, pathway analysis and regulatory network analysis; and 4) translate the above computational findings to the molecular mechanisms underlying human genetic disorders by conducting experimental validation through collaborations.

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