Dr. Lihua Julie Zhu
Research Professor
University of Massachusetts
USA
Biography
Dr. Lihua Julie Zhu is a research professor and the head of Bioinformatics Core in the department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Prior to joining UMASS, she served as the Director of Bioinformatics Consulting Core and the Director of Clinical Informatics Group of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center (RHLCCC) at Northwestern University. Her work is devoted to the understanding of gene regulation and cancer biology, biomarker discovery, and development and application of genome editing technology. Her expertise is algorithms and computational tool development. Her group is an active contributor to the open-source open-development Bioconductor project. They have developed a dozen packages with various utilities, ranging from gRNA design, machine learning, peak calling, annotation, data integration to visualization. Among them, two packages are for designing and evaluating gRNAs for the genome editing technology using engineered CRISPR-Cas9 nucleases: CRISPRseek is for designing target-specific and efficient gRNAs; and GUIDEseq is for evaluating the specificity of gRNAs using GUIDE-seq and CIRCLE-seq technologies. Among her 76 publications
Research Interest
Bioinformatics