Our Lead Bioinformaticians
Note: This page was prepared for academic customers. Clients from the biotech / pharmaceutical / therapeutic / molecular diagnosis industries, please visit this web site instead.
Our current Lead Bioinformatician (LB) team includes the following highly experienced bioinformatics experts. Their domains of expertise are highly related yet each has special focuses. Combined, they cover most sub-areas of bioinformatics. Note: we are constantly looking for top bioinformatics experts possessing complementary expertise to join our LB team. If interested, please visit this page.
Lead Bioinformatician Profiles
Justin T. Li, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Biophysics, M.S. in Computer Science, Ph.D. in Neurobiology. Justin was an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) between 2004 and 2009, Chief Bioinformaticis Officer at LC Sciences (Houston) between 2009 and 2013, and joined AccuraScience as a Lead Bioinformatician in June 2013. Justin published ~40 research articles, led the development of 12 bioinformatics databases and web servers between 2004 and 2013 (some of the best known ones include miRecords, siRecords, siDRM, dbCRID, SVRMHC and PepCyber:PPEP), and acquired ~$3.4M in research funds through NIH and other funding agencies as Principal Investigator (PI), co-PI or co-I between 2004 and 2018. Justin started working on NGS data analysis in 2007, and his domains of expertise include common NGS application (genome assembly, whole-genome resequencing, exome and targeted resequencing, RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, scATAC-seq, Multiome, ChIP-seq and related (ATAC-seq, CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag, HiChIP and PLAC-seq), metagenomics, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore data analysis), AI/machine learning/deep learning applications, AlphaFold and structural bioinformatics, immunoinformatics, microRNA and non-coding RNA analysis.
Alberto Riva, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Electrical Engineering, M.S. in Computer Science, Ph.D. in Bioengineering. Alberto is a bioinformatics expert with extensive background in computer science, artificial intelligence, and medical informatics. He has held faculty appointments at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School and the Genetics Institute, University of Florida. In January 2014, Alberto joined AccuraScience’s team of Lead Bioinformaticians. Alberto has published ~40 peear-reviewed papers and 3 book chapters, and his work focuses on developing computational tools and methods for genomics and translational research. He has designed and implemented a number of web-based and stand-alone applications for a wide range of research areas, from the study of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), to NGS and the study of alternative splicing through RNA-seq, to genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and analysis of DNA methylation. Alberto started working on NGS data analysis in 2007. Moreover, Alberto is also an expert in high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and in designing software that facilitates HPC application in bioinformatics.
Tom Xu, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Computer Science, Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology. Tom is an expert in complex functional and statistical analysis of biological data. He was a Computational Genomics Specialist at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) between 2003 and 2012, has been an adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) since January 2012, and joined AccuraScience as a Lead Bioinformatician in June 2013. Tom’s work as Computational Genomics Specialist involved supporting researchers in NGS experimental design and data analysis, collaborating research projects and grant proposals, as well as providing tutorials and workshops for NGS applications and analyses. He published >15 research articles related to NGS and genomics in the past three years. Tom's domains of expertise include RNA-seq, whole-genome and targeted resequencing, ChIP-seq, scRNA-seq, scATAC-seq, eQTL, splicing, gene fusion, genome assembly, epigenetics/epigenomics, metagenomics, and structural bioinformatics (AlphaFold modeling).
Paul L. Jenkins, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Economics, M.S. in Experimental Psychology, Ph.D. in Statistics. Paul is an experienced biostatistician who has been working in medical research and clinical trials for over 30 years. He has served as the Director of Statistics and Computing for the Research Institute of Bassett Healthcare Network since 1989. He has also held faculty appointments in the Department of Mathematics at Hartwick College, the State University of New York at Albany's School of Public Health, and the Department of Mathematics of the State University of New York at Oneonta. In addition to teaching courses in analysis of variance, survival analysis, and clustered data analysis, he serves on doctoral dissertation committees of students at the SUNY School of Public Health in Albany and Umea University in Umea, Sweden. Paul has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles and abstracts that cover medical, public health, and quality of health care subject areas. He has consulted on a wide array of clinical trials in areas such as interventional cardiology, obesity, and preventive medicine. He has published articles on sampling methodology in both the American Journal of Epidemiology and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. In May of 2015 Paul joined AccuraScience's staff of Lead Bioinformaticians.
King Jordan, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.A. in Biology, Ph.D. in Genetics. As a leading researcher on the influence of transposable elements on the structure, function and evolution of eukaryotic genomes, King is also dedicated in developing and application of algorithms for functional genomics analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. He has worked in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) for six years, and have held an associate professor appointment in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech, while serving as co-director of PanAmerican Bioinformatics Institute. He has published 95 research publications since 1996, and developed 7 software packages for NGS and functional genomics analysis. King became a Lead Bioinformatician of AccuraScience in January 2014.
Zack J. Tu, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Biochemistry, M.S. in Software System, Ph.D. in Pharmacology. Zack is a computational genomics expert with extensive experience in providing informatics and computational support to large number of research laboratories. He oversaw the setup and operation of the main computational and bioinformatics infrastructure of the University of Minnesota’s research sequencing center (2001 and 2012), and had participated in the operation of a clinical genome sequencing facility. In June 2013, Zack joined AccuraScience as a Lead Bioinformatician. Zack has been working with NGS data analysis since 2006, and has had extensive experience with data generated from Roche/454, Illumina and Ion Torrent platforms. His domains of expertise include genome assembly and characterization, bulk RNA-seq and scRNA-seq, computational simulation of variant detection, somatic and germline SNV and Indel analysis and clinic interpretation of identified variants.
William W. Gong, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. B.S. in Biology, M.S. in Zoology, Ph.D. in Genomics and Bioinformatics. William is an expert in statistical modeling of high-dimensional biological data, including Bayesian inference-based modeling, kernel machine and deep learning. He is also a master in parallel computing environment MPI and MapReduce. William worked as a bioinformatician in the University of Minnesota between 2004 and 2012, and joined AccuraScience in June 2013 as a Lead Bioinformatician. William started working with NGS data in 2007, and his domains of expertise include whole-genome, exome and other targeted resequencing, ChIP-seq, repeated element analysis, miRNA target analysis, epigenomics, network analysis, functional annotation, integrating heterogeneous biological information, AI/machine learning/deep learning applications, AlphaFold and structural modeling.
Thomas Girke, Ph.D., Ad Hoc Lead Bioinformatician. B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Thomas is an Associate Professor and Director of the Bioinformatics Facility in the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on the development of computational data analysis methods for genome biology and small molecule discovery, including discovery-oriented data mining projects, as well as algorithm and software development projects for data types from a variety of high-throughput technologies such as NGS, genome-wide profiling approaches and chemical genomics. Thomas published 58 research articles between 1998 and 2013, and he is the main instructor of very successful workshop program on high-throughput data analysis using R and Bioconductor resources. Thomas started working on NGS data analysis in 2006, and his domains of expertise include bulk RNA-Seq, scRNA-seq, Ribo-Seq, smallRNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, ATAC-seq, CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag, HiCHIP, VAR-Seq and de novo assembly. Thomas became an Ad Hoc Lead Bioinformatician at AccuraScience in January 2014.
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