The purpose of our group is to provide bioinformatics support to the research community in MCCB.
Our areas of greatest interest include data integration and data mining of high-throughput experiments
such as ChIP-seq, ChIP-chip and microarrays. Working with MCCB researchers, we aim to develop and
apply computational tools to analyze and integrate various data sources.
Lihua Julie Zhu obtained her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, and her M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University in Chicago in 2001. Prior to joining UMMS in 2007, she has served as the Director of the Bioinformatics Consulting Core, and the Director of the clinical informatics core at the Cancer Center of Northwestern University in Chicago.
Her work is devoted to the understanding of gene regulation and cancer biology, biomarker discovery, and devel opment and application of gene editing technology by mining and integrating various high-throughput datasets. Her expertise is algorithm and computational tool development. Her group has developed more than a dozen packages with various utilities such as gRNA design, machine learning application, peak calling, motif alignment, quality assessment, annotation, data integration and visualization.
Kai Hu received his B.S. in Biological Sciences from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2013. He then obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences from Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in 2019. By leveraging bioinformatics and biochemistry, his thesis work led to the discovery of a novel metal-free class Ie Ribonucleotide Reductase (RNR). Kai's current work includes bioinformatics analysis/consulting for various data types and developing novel computational tools. Kai is also a fan of website development, database management, and machine learning. During his spare time, he enjoys being a quiet angler, a fossil hunter, and a gardener.
Junhui Li obtained his B.S. in Tea Science from Anhui Agricultural University in 2012 and M.A. in Biostatistics and Quantitative Genetics from China Agricultural University in 2015, focusing on pleiotropic quantitative trait locus map and the development of the R package JM4QTN. Since 2015, he has been working on the analysis of GWAS, QTL mapping, RNA-seq, DNA-seq, and exon-seq. He published four R packages including StepReg, gtWAS, TmCalculator, and ProbeDeveloper. He joined MCCB in November 2020 as Bioinformaticain II, working on NGS data analysis, Rshiny, and package development.
Yaro earned his BA in Computer Science and Biochemistry from The City University of New York before pursuing a PhD in Computational Biology at Yale University, where he trained with Morgan Levine and Albert Higgins-Chen. His graduate research focused on developing computational methods for the analysis of diverse omics datasets, contributing to studies of aging and age-related diseases.
He joined the MCCB Bioinformatics Core in 2026, where he collaborates with investigators on computational analyses and develops bioinformatics workflows for NGS and other omics datasets. Outside of work, he enjoys combat sports, hiking, playing guitar, and community service.
Correspondence on any aspect of this site is encouraged.
Email: kai.hu@umassmed.edu
Office: LRB 608
Phone: +1 508 856 5379
Address: Molecular, Cell & Cancer Biology, 364 Plantation Street Worcester, MA 01605