Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Peking Union Medical College, Beijing

Ph.D.

07/2003

Cell Biology

Dr. Zhou has been leading the Functional Genomics research team at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School since 2009. Her group focuses on deciphering function of human genome, mainly genetic regions identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) or eQTL analysis in respiratory diseases. Through interpreting biological meanings of GWAS findings, her lab aims to identify novel drug targets in complex pulmonary diseases.
To interpret biological meaning of genetic variants/regions associated with complex diseases, Dr. Zhou's group has established a pipeline to dissect local chromatin structure surrounding GWAS and eQTL SNPs, including ChIP, FAIRE (Formaldehyde-Assisted Isolation of Regulatory Elements), 3C (chromatin conformation capture) and 4C(chromatin conformation capture sequencing). We also recently applied a high-throughput screening to identify functional variants within GWAS loci by massively paralleled reporter assay (MPRA). The state-of-the-art genome editing method, mainly CRISPR/Cas-9 has also been routinely applied to identify functional regulatory variants in a semi-high-throughput way and to asses function of novel GWAS genes. Additionally, to pursue further mechanistic studies on GWAS candidate genes, her group characterized protein interactome in vitro and generated knockout and transgenic mouse lines in disease relevant murine models. In collaboration with multiple cross-functional groups, he group has identified functional variants in the HHIP and FAM13A two COPD GWAS loci and also identified novel druggable pathways associated with genetic predispositions in COPD.
Additionally, Functional Genomics Laboratory led by her has also developed customized experimental validations on networks built upon various human –omics datasets, including genomics, proteomics and genetics data.