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Yuji Zhang, PhD

Academic Title:

Professor

Primary Appointment:

Epidemiology & Public Health

Location:

Howard Hall, 109C

Phone (Primary):

410-706-8523

Fax:

410-706-8548

Education and Training

Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

M.S. in Bioinformatics, Southeast University, China.

B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, Southeast University, China.

Biosketch

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on developing translational informatics approaches to reveal novel human disease mechanisms. She has solid interdisciplinary trainings in bioinformatics and Computer Engineering. Dr. Zhang has years of research experience in integrative analysis of multi-source high-dimensional biological data for novel association discovery between different biological entities (e.g., gene, drug, and gene) under different biological states. In addition, she has extensive collaborative research experience in medical informatics, ontology, software engineering, and biomedical and basic science fields. Her current research mission is to leverage the gap between the analytical needs of arising from multi-source biological “big” data in biomedical research and advanced informatics approaches. As the lead of the bioinformatics core at University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center and University of Maryland School of Medicine, Dr. Zhang has been serving as co-principle investigator/co-investigator leading the bioinformatics and statistical analyses in numerous federal funded research projects including the International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics (ICPCG) and the consortium of Extracellular non-coding RNA biomarker discovery of hepatocellular cancer. She has also been organizing/co-organizing several international workshops in the informatics field since 2012.

Research/Clinical Keywords

Translational Bioinformatics, Network Medicine, Systems Biology, Next Generation Sequencing, Systems Pharmocogenomics, Non Coding RNA mechanisms

Highlighted Publications

  1. Wang J, Zhao L, Ye Y, Zhang Y. Adverse event detection by integrating Twitter data and VAERS. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 2018 Jun 20; 9:19.
  2. Wang L, Felts SJ, Van Keulen VP, Scheid AD, Block MS, Markovic SN, Pease LR, Zhang Y. Integrative genome-wide analysis of long noncoding RNAs in diverse immune cell types of melanoma patients. Cancer Research, 2018 Jun 12; pii: canres.0529.2018. 
  3. Zhang Y, Shen F, Mojarad MR, Li D, Tao C, Yu Y, Liu S, Liu H. Systematic identification of latent disease-gene relationships from PubMed articles. PLOS ONE, 2018 Jan 16; 13(1): e0191568.
  4. Wang L, Ma X, Xu X, Zhang Y. Systematic identification and characterization of cardiac long intergenic noncoding RNAs in zebrafish. Scientific Reports, 2017 Apr 28;7(1):1250.
  5. Zhang Y, Zhu Q, Liu H. Next generation informatics for big data in precision medicine era. BioData Mining, 2015 Nov 3;8:34. 
  6. Thibodeau SN, French AJ, McDonnell SK, Cheville J, Middha S, Tillmans L, Riska S, Baheti S, Larson MC, Fogarty Z, Zhang Y, Larson N, Nair A, O’Brien D, Wang L, Schaid DJ. Identification of candidate genes for prostate cancer-risk SNPs utilizing a normal prostate tissue eQTL data set. Nature communications, 2015 Nov 27;6:8653.
  7. Zhang Y, Tao C, Jiang G, Nair AA, Su J, Chute CG, Liu H. Network-based analysis reveals distinct association patterns in a semantic MEDLINE-based drug-disease-gene network. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 2014 Aug 6;5:33. 
  8. Zhang Y, Tao C, He Y, Kanjamala P, Liu H. Network-based analysis of vaccine-related associations reveals consistent knowledge with the vaccine ontology. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 2013 Nov 11;4(1):33.
  9. Wang J, Zhang Y, Marian C, Ressom HW. Identification of aberrant pathways and network activities from high-throughput data. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2012;13(4):406-19.

Additional Publication Citations

Awards and Affiliations

Grants and Contracts

In the News

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