Principal Investigator
Dr. Changde Cheng started his academic journey at Peking University, the top university in China. He later moved to the United States to pursue his education and training at UCLA, under the guidance of Dr. Charles Taylor in ecology and evolution, and at the University of Notre Dame, with Dr. Nora Besansky in genetics and infectious diseases. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, he worked with Dr. Mark Kirkpatrick in population genetics and theoretical biology, and Dr. David Houle in quantitative genetics. After that, he worked as a senior/lead computational research scientist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the top research hospitals in the country. He currently serves as a faculty member in the Stem Cell Program at the Heersink School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Doug Welsch – Bioinformatician
Doug Welsch earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from William Marsh Rice University, a leading research university in the United States. During his college years, he also pursued a minor in Biochemistry and Cell Biology. As a student researcher at Rice, he worked in Dr. M. Neal Waxham’s lab at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, focusing on image analysis of synthetic lipid vesicles under cryo-EM, and co-authored a publication in Biophysical Reports. He also worked in Dr. Hongjie Li’s Lab at Baylor College of Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Tzu-Chiao Lu on single-cell data analysis and published a co-authored paper in Science.
