Jihoon Kim, PhD

Before moving to Yale as a founding faculty member of the Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Dr. Jihoon Kim, PhD, was a bioinformatician and co-Investigator, closely working with Dr. Jane Burns for the last 12 years on the study of Kawasaki Disease (KD) genetics as a member of KD Research Center (KDRC). He developed several bioinformatics software tools, algorithms, and analysis pipelines using KD omics datasets, including the first whole genome sequencing of African KD family in collaboration with Illumina, KD microRNA biomarker discovery from small RNA sequencing using parallel algorithms based on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), a drug response study of KD RNA-Seq with statin, and a transcriptome-based risk score to discriminate KD from Multisystem Inflammation in Children (MIS-C). Kim has a track record of successful bioinformatics projects in distributed computing and secure environments, which involve development of software tools for family GWAS, statistical and machine learning models in collaboration with Dr. Mike Levin’s team at Imperial College London, all supported by NIH grants. With KD as a model disease, he demonstrated how to effectively conduct genetic study of rare diseases, where the samples of affected children are scarce and analysis methods are not well established, through multi-omics assays.

Kim also has a track record of scientific contributions in experimental design, data analysis, interpretation, and manuscript preparation for various clinical studies with physician researchers to train and validate risk score models in the fields of cancer staging, COVID-19, anesthesia, and federated learning.