Dr. Qingrun Zhang
Positions
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Child Health & Wellness Researcher
Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute
Member
Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute
Contact information
Background
Biography
Dr. Qingrun Zhang has her undergraduate training in Biology and PhD in Statistical Genetics (Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing Institute of Genomics). After 6 years postdoc training on genetics, genomics and epigenomic, she moved to University of Calgary, as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Department of Molecular Biology, and a bioinformatics specialist at Charbonneau Cancer Institute.
Research
Areas of Research
- Bioinformatics
- Cancer
- Genomics
The high-throughput sequencing has dramatically reduced the cost of sequencing from $2.7 billion (in the Human Genome Project in 2003) to a few thousand dollars now; therefore it is widely believed that the fields of genetics, agriculture, and medicine will be revolutionized. On the path to achieve this exciting goal, there are many challenges. We have been working on the field focusing three fundamental questions: (1) How to discover genomic variants from the massive data and effectively store and analyze them using state-of-the-art computational techniques. (2) How to carry out statistical inference despite of the uncertainty brought by the sequencing and alignment errors. (3) How to identify associations between causal genes and the relevant phenotype in the presence of many confounding factors as well as gene-gene interactions using data mining models.
Currently, we are using genomics for cancer driver genes discovery and risk predictions. We also develop computational tools tailored to different cancer genomes.
Participation in university strategic initiatives
Courses
Course number | Course title | Semester |
---|---|---|
DATA 602 | Statistical Data Analysis | Winter |
DATA 607 | Statistical and Machine Learning | Winter |
STAT 213 | Introduction to Statistics I | Winter |
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