Dr. Zhao is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Chief Bioinformatics Officer at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), with join appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received his Ph.D. in human and molecular genetics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UT-Houston). He also received three M.S. degrees: genetics from Peking University, biomathematics from UT-Houston, and computer science from the University of Houston. After completion of his Keck Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in computational and structural Biology, he worked as an assistant professor of bioinformatics and psychiatry in Virginia Commonwealth University from 2003 through 2009. He joined Vanderbilt University in 2009.

Dr. Zhao's research interests include bioinformatics and systems biology approaches to studying complex diseases (data management, integration, gene ranking, gene features and networks, etc); genome-wide or large-scale analysis of genetic variation and methylation patterns; microRNA gene networks; comparative genomics; computational tool development, and biomedical informatics. He published more than 50 papers in these areas. Dr. Zhao served as editorial board member in 6 journals, program committee member and session chair in 9 international conferences, frequent reviewers for more than 25 journals and book publishers, and editor/co-editor of 3 special issues/conference proceedings. He received several awards including the Keck Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship (twice: 2002, 2003), White Magnolia Award (2006), NARSAD Young Investigator Award (twice, 2005, 2008) and the best paper award (ICIC'08).

Links:

• Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Laboratory
• Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC)
• Schizophrenia Gene Resource (SZGR)
• Ethanol-Related Gene Resource (ERGR)
• InPrePPI (Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions)