Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Xianjun Dong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, a Faculty member of the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Since 2020, Dr. Dong has been appointed to direct this Genomics and Bioinformatics Hub at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and also run his own research lab as an independent PI. Before taking this position, Dr. Dong has been serving as the Director of the Computational Neuroscience Unit of the Precision Neurology Program at BWH and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School for 7 years. He specialized in developing and applying computational methods to understand the transcriptional regulation of the human genome, by integrating genomic, transcriptomic, epigenetic, and clinical data from both healthy subjects and patients with neurological diseases. He is particularly interested in the non-coding RNAs (eRNA, circRNA, miRNA, etc.) in the human brain. He has expertise in analyzing various NGS data, incl. ChIPseq, RNAseq, RNA-PET, CAGE, and WGS data.

Dr. Dong received his PhD degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Bergen (supervisor: Boris Lenhard) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (supervisor: Zhiping Weng). He was an active member of the ENCODE consortium. He has 40+ publications with 20,000+ citations and an H-index of 24. He is recently awarded by the American Parkinson’s Disease Association (APDA), Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), and NIH (two R01, U01, R41, U19). In his spare time, he raises three kids and 15 chickens. See his website for more details: http://sterding.github.io.

• Bioinformatics
• Genomics
• gene regulation
• Transcriptional Regulatory Element
• Parkinson's Disease
• Alzheimer's Disease
• Huntington's Disease
• Machine Learning
• Computational Biology
• Non-Coding RNA
• Enhancer Element
• RNA Sequencing, High-Throughput