JINGHUI ZHANG was named as the first chair of the Department of Computational Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She will hold the St. Jude Endowed Chair in Bioinformatics.
The department will occupy an entire floor in the Kay Research and Care Center, the newest building on the St. Jude campus. The 28,700-square-foot space will be named the Brooks Brothers Computational Biology Center and hold both laboratories and offices. It will also house a genome sequencing laboratory. The department plans to grow to include nine faculty members during the next several years.
“Dr. Zhang has created new computational methods for analyzing genomic data, leading to new directions in research involving high-risk leukemia, brain and solid tumors,” said James Downing, St. Jude president and CEO.
Five years ago, the hospital launched the St. Jude-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project to map the genomes of childhood cancers. Data generated from the project, 100 trillion-plus pieces, encompass the complete normal and cancer genomes of 700 children and adolescents with 23 different childhood cancers.
Zhang joined St. Jude in 2010, leading the effort to analyze PCGP data and the creation of several new computational tools that have been adopted by biologists worldwide.
Her work has helped define the landscape of mutations that underlie pediatric cancers, resulting in the identification of new pediatric cancer genetic subtypes, insights into cancer-drug resistance and metastatic behavior, and new therapeutic targets against which drugs can be developed.
Prior to St. Jude, Zhang led genetic variation analysis of the first assembled human genome. She also contributed to key discoveries in the pilot phases of the NCI’s Cancer Genome Atlas Project and the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatment initiative.
