Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China	B.S.	07/2012	Biological Sciences
Peking Union Medical College at Tsinghua Univsersity, Beijing, China	Ph.D.	07/2017	Genetics
National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), Beijing, China	Postdoctoral	07/2018	Bioinformatics
Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA	Postdoctoral		Genomic Medicine

Dr. Boxun Zhao joined Dr. E. Alice Lee and Dr. Timothy W. Yu's labs in August 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow after a one-year postdoctoral training at Meng-Qiu Dong’s lab in National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), Beijing, China. He obtained his PhD in Genetics in 2017 from Peking Union Medical College and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. During his doctoral research in Liping Wei’s laboratory at the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) and Peking University, he studied somatic transposable element (TE) insertions in the human brain and neurological disorders. He developed a novel experimental protocol and established a bioinformatics pipeline to profile genome-wide TE insertions from bulk tissue samples, and his method is sufficiently sensitive to detect low-clonal TE insertions, i.e., ones present in a small number of cells. He has also participated in other projects investigating somatic point mutations in autism and healthy human genomes, and validating large structural variations that are undetectable by typical short-read sequencing platforms. His strong background in human transposon elements and his talents in experimental and computational work give him a solid foundation to pursue his long-term goal of resolving the importance and functional impact of TE insertions in human diseases; and translating scientific discoveries into therapeutics to cure diseases caused by transposon insertion.

• retrotransposition
• mosaicism
• somatic insertion
• Rett syndrome