Academic Background
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. She joined the Bioinformatics Core of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center (RHLCCC) of Northwestern University in 2001, where she was the Director of Bioinformatics Consulting Core from 2003 to 2005 and the Director of Clinical Informatics Group from 2005 to 2007. She joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) as the head of Bioinformatics core of Program in Gene Function and Expression (PGFE) in 2007. Dr. Zhu is currently a professor and the head of Bioinformatics Core in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology (MCCB) of UMMS.
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

We are interested in the understanding of gene regulation and cancer etiology, biomarker discovery, and development and application of genome editing technology by mining and integrating various high-throughput datasets such as WGS, ChIP-seq, bulk and single cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq, miRNA-seq, Hi-C, shRNA-seq, PAS-seq, NAD-seq and GUIDE-seq. Our expertise is algorithm and computational tool development. We have developed more than 20 computational tools, including a dozen Bioconductor packages. These tools encompass functionalities such as RNA-seq data analysis, scATAC-seq data analysis, gRNA design and offtarget analysis, machine learning applications, peak calling, proteomics data analysis, motif alignment, quality assessment, annotation, model selection, data integration and visualization.