My research interest is bioinformatics, a unique interdisciplinary area, which is the merger of biotechnology and information technology with the goal of revealing new insights and principles in biology. My current grant, entitled “Facile Production and Efficient Indexing of Transposon-tagged Lines Using Next-generation Sequencing Technology for Maize” funded by NSF, uses the next generation sequencing technology to analyze the maize genome. I have been carrying out bioinformatics analysis for sequence assembly, annotation, and mapping of millions of short reads to the maize reference genome. My another project is The Genomics Education Partnership (GEP). The Partnership is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute along with fifty other institutions across the country, with the goal of providing research opportunities for undergraduate students. My research results have been published in very prestigious scientific journals, such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Genome Research, BMC Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, BMC Genomics, and Molecular Plant-Microbe Interaction.

Bioinformatics, Evolutionary Genomics