Mengyuan Kan, PhD

I specialize in genetics, genomics, and biomedical informatics and have dedicated my research efforts to uncover genetic and environmental risk factors for complex diseases. I utilize omics approaches, including whole-exome sequencing, whole-genome sequencing, RNA-Seq, single-cell RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq, to identify genetic and epigenetic variants, genes and pathways that contribute to cell and tissue-specific mechanisms underlying disease pathobiology. Besides conducting single-modality-based omics studies, I have extended my research to multi-omics data integration, which provides new mechanistic insights. Using the phenotype of asthma drug response as a study model, I have integrated multi-omics data from in-house and public sources and identified novel genetic loci with functional evidence that were not pursued in previous genome-wide association studies due to their inability to reach genome-wide levels of statistical significance. Additionally, I develop open-source informatics tools, pipelines, and web applications to facilitate reproducible analysis of omics data and visualization of analysis-ready omics results.

Before I joined as a postdoctoral researcher in Himes lab, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in genetics at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the mentorship of Dr. Lin He. During my Ph.D. years, I received training in statistical genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine, under the mentorship of Dr. Suzanne M. Leal.