About

• Mentorship Training Completions:
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• Department Affiliations:
• Department of Genetics; Neuroscience Center

• Other UNC PhD Program Affiliations:
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology; Neurology; Pharmacology

We try to bridge the gap between genetic risk factors for psychiatric illnesses and neurobiological mechanisms by decoding the regulatory relationships of the non-coding genome. In particular, we implement Hi-C, a genome-wide chromosome conformation capture technique, to identify the folding principle of the genome in human brain. We then leverage this information to identify the functional impacts of the common variants associated with neuropsychiatric disorders.

My Research

1. Neurobiology of neurological disorders: Despite a recent flood of research identifying genome-wide association (GWAS) loci in a range of neurological disorders, many of the loci reside in intronic/intergenic regions of the genome, making it difficult to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of the disorder. Our goal is to leverage multiple functional genomics toolkits to assign GWAS loci to their target genes, and provide rich insights into the neurological basis of neurological disorders.
2. Multiplexed reporter assays: To functionally characterize non-coding variants associated with human traits and diseases, we employ a massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA), a high-throughput screening platform that enables the simultaneous functional validation of regulatory activity of thousands of variants in a single experiment. We plan to apply MPRA to hundreds of thousands of genetic variants associated with a wide range of diseases to (1) decode the principle underlying variant effects on gene regulation and (2) prioritize variants causally implicated in diseases.