Dr. Chongzhi Zang is a Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Virginia (UVA) and serves as Director of Computational Genomics at the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center. He also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and Biomedical Engineering at UVA. Dr. Zang received his undergraduate degree in physics from Peking University and his PhD in physics from the George Washington University, followed by postdoctoral training in computational biology at Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute before joining the UVA faculty in 2016. Dr. Zang’s research focuses on computational method development, transcriptional regulation, and chromatin biology. He has developed several widely used bioinformatics tools for epigenomics analysis, and his innovative computational work has enabled important discoveries in gene regulation across various biological systems. As an internationally recognized researcher, he has served as a grant reviewer for multiple funding agencies in the United States and around the world.
Abstract
Transcriptional regulation plays a central role in diverse biological processes, including cell differentiation and cancer progression. Understanding regulatory mechanisms and identifying the transcriptional regulators responsible for differential gene expression remain fundamental challenges in molecular biology and genomics. The rapid expansion of public high-throughput data and advances in computational modeling and data mining create powerful opportunities to address these questions at a global scale. In this talk, I will present several computational methods developed by my lab to improve the analysis of chromatin profiling data, account for technical artifacts and biases, and accurately predict active transcriptional regulators. I will also discuss our recent data-inspired research on cancer gene regulation through transcriptional condensates. These studies demonstrate the power of integrative computational genomics to both advance methodological innovation and uncover new mechanisms of chromatin and transcriptional regulation.