Qingrun Zhang

Dr. Qingrun Zhang

PhD

Positions

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

Web presence

Phone number

Office: 403.220.2833

Location

Office: MS428

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

Area of Focus
  • Bioinformatics
  • Cancer
  • Genomics
Summary of Research

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