Sihai Dave Zhao (GNDP), an associate professor of statistics, has been appointed the Director of Computational Genomics at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

Zhao has been a member of the IGB for over eight years, joining the year he came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the IGB he develops analysis strategies for genomic data, improves statistical applications in biology, and studies spatial transcriptomics and behavioral genomics.

In bioinformatics, machine learning (ML) tools are used to solve problems in molecular biology and genetics. In healthy cells, genes — the carriers of hereditary information — are switched “on” or “off” to carry out specific tasks. Bioinformatics researchers can decode DNA using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand why some of these switches occur inappropriately, leading to disease.