Xianjun Dong, PhD

Xianjun Dong is a Principal Investigator at the Adams Center for Parkinson’s Disease Research at Yale, with a primary appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and a secondary appointment at the Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at Yale School of Medicine, Yale University. Before that, he was a faculty at Harvard for 10 years. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, a Faculty member of the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. In 2020, Dr. Dong was appointed as the founding director of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Hub at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) while running a research lab as an independent PI. Before taking this position, Dr. Dong served as the Director of the Computational Neuroscience Unit in the Center of Advanced Parkinson Research at BWH and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School for six years. He specialized in developing and applying computational methods to understand the transcriptional regulation of the human genome, by integrating genomic, transcriptomic, epigenetic, and clinical data from both healthy subjects and patients with neurological diseases. He is particularly interested in the non-coding regions of the human genome and has identified tens of thousands of novel non-coding regulatory RNAs, incl. enhancer RNAs and circular RNAs, in the human brain genome. He has expertise in analyzing various sequencing data, including ATACseq, RNAseq, RNA-PET, CAGE, and WGS data, from both bulk and single-cell samples.

Dr. Dong received his PhD degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Bergen, Norway, under the supervision of Dr. Boris Lenhard and Postdoctoral training in the renowned program of Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (supervisor: Dr. Dr. Zhiping Weng). Before that, he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering (BME) from Southeast University, the top BME program in China. He worked in Procter & Gamble (P&G) as a manager trainee shortly before deciding to pursue a PhD. During his PhD, he was fascinated by the long-range gene regulation mechanism in vertebrates. By tracking the evolutionary fate of genomic regulatory block (GRBs) in teleost fish, he identified a set of human exons that can also function as regulatory elements (e.g. enhancers) in addition to their protein-coding function (Dong et al. Nucleic Acids Res 2010). They are the first who identify this dual-function phenomenon of the human genome at a genome-wide level. This concept was later replicated by several other groups and further coined as ‘duon’ in 2013. In his postdoc training, Dr. Dong was an active member of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) project, which has been recognized as the next milestone after the Human Genome Project and as a “Top 10 Breakthrough of the Year 2012.” His direct contribution was to build a novel two-step model predicting both the status (“on/off”) and the levels of gene expression with epigenetic signals in various cancer cellular contexts (ENCODE et al. Nature, 2012; Dong et al. Genome Biology, 2012; Dong et al. Epigenomics, 2013). He was a Lead Data Analyst in the landmark Nature article (“An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome,” Nature, 2012; 757 citations in 2013 alone). He has 40+ publications with 24,000+ citations and an H-index of 30 according to his Google Scholar. Since starting his lab in 2020, he has helped to secure over $30 million funds collectively, with more than $10 million total cost awarded to his team. He is recently funded by the American Parkinson’s Disease Association (APDA), Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), and NIH (two R01, U19, U01, R41, R24). In his spare time, he raises three kids and 15 chickens.