01/01/24: Yang has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure!

12/01/23: Congratulations to Phoenix, newly minted PhD! Phoenix will be continuing his work on immunogenomics in Soumya Raychaudhuri’s lab at Harvard. We’ll be seeing you at conferences!

08/01/23: Excited to welcome Dylan and Hao to our lab! Dylan is starting as a PhD student and will focus on genomic methods to study RNA splicing and splice-switching small molecules. Hao joins as a student research assistant and will focus on deep learning methods for studying RNA splicing. Welcome!!

05/17/23: Au revoir Eric and Gabi! Eric will be starting his PhD studies at Harvard, congrats!

06/20/22: Good bye to Yi who is going to Stanford as a postdoc in Aaron Gitler’s lab. Farewell Yi, you will be missed!

05/20/22: Congratulations to Chao who passed his quals and is officially a PhD candidate with us!

4/22/22: Tony’s work on Pangolin is now out in Genome Biology! Congratulations Tony!!

10/31/21: Excited to have Eric Chen and Gabi Mossian join us as research assistant and research tech, respectively! Eric joins us for his gap year after doing his undergrad at UChicago, and Gabi joins us from Indiana University.

10/18/21: Ankeeta’s paper on APA methods is out in Genome Biology! Well done!

8/21/21: Pleased to see our lab grow as Chao and Carlos join the lab!! Chao is a PhD student from the GGSB program and Carlos joins us from UC Berkeley, where he did his PhD, and will be jointly advised by Matthew Stephens! Welcome!!

6/01/21: Lab undergrads Tony and Shane have accepted their offers to start PhDs at Stanford and Cornell, respectively. Huge congrats to them both!! We will miss you, but really well deserved, and really proud of you two!!!

1/30/21: Phoenix’s paper on eQTL/sQTL colocalization with autoimmune GWAS has been accepted at Genome Biology! Phoenix started this massive project during his rotation in 2019, really impressive progress!

1/21/21: Our paper on single-cell RNA-seq alignment has been accepted at Genome Research! Look out for Dmatch!

7/15/20: Good bye to Fabio and Stephanie, you will be both missed! Fabio is starting a faculty position at Clemson University and Stephanie will be starting her PhD at UC Davis! In other news, welcome to our new lab tech Austin! Hope to see you in person soon enough!

7/3/20: Briana’s paper on the genetics of alternative polyadenylation is now out at eLife! Hurray!

4/30/20: We received our Notification of Award for the R01 with the Staley lab!

10/15/19: We’ve just received an excellent score for a R01 with the Staley lab! This grant will fund our work on studying the mechanisms of splicing QTLs!

08/08/19: Ben, Phoenix, and Yang just returned from a visit to our collaborators in Xi’an, China! We’ve set up genomic experiments to assay gene regulation in autoimmune patients!
Here they are enjoying a (fake) bowl of noodles at a night market: Phoenix and Ben eating noodles (fake).

06/30/19: Congrats to Ankeeta for passing her qual exams with flying colors! She is officially a PhD candidate now!! Also congratulations to Shane for winning a BSCD Fellowship to work in the lab this Summer. He’ll be working with Ben on a RNA splicing assay for early cancer diagnosis.

05/02/19: Our paper Trans effects on gene expression can drive omnigenic inheritance is now out in Cell.

04/30/19: We’ve received the Notice of Award for our first R01! This will fund our research for 5 years on understanding regulatory mechanisms that connect genetic variation to disease!

04/24/19: We are very excited to welcome Phoenix Mu to our lab as a PhD student! Phoenix received his B.S. from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and will spearhead our lab’s work on autoimmune disease genetics in collaboration with collaborators here at UChicago and from the Xijing Hospital in China!

In other news, our paper on Parkinson’s TWAS is out in Nature Communications!

01/17/19: Two papers we contributed to are now out in the same issue of CellOne on structural variation in human and the other on using deep learning to predict the effect of genetic variants on mRNA splicing. Congratulations to Ankeeta for her contribution to her first Cell paper!

11/15/18: We’ve been awarded our first grant, from the Cancer Research Foundation, to develop splicing-assays for leukemia detection. More details here.

10/08/18: Two exciting manuscripts are out from the lab! (1) Trans effects on gene expression can drive omnigenic inheritance posted on biorXiv and (2) Integrative transcriptome analyses of the aging brain implicate altered splicing in Alzheimer’s disease susceptibility published online in Nature Genetics.

9/01/18: Ben Fair is the second postdoc to join our lab, and will be jointly advised by Yoav Gilad!! Ben is an expert on RNA splicing who did his PhD at Cornell under the supervision of Jeff Pleiss.

8/01/18: Fabio Morgante from Trudy Mackay’s lab has now joined our lab as a postdoc, he’ll be jointly advised by Matthew Stephens. Fabio has been working a long time in the field of quantitative genetics and will continue to do so in our lab. Welcome!!

6/01/18: Undergrads Tony Zeng and Shane Warland have joined the lab for the summer! Tony will work on a computational project with us and Shane on wet lab experiments!

5/01/18: Ankeeta Shah is our first grad student! Very excited to have her in the lab!! As an undergrad, Ankeeta worked on topics related to RNA splicing with Chaolin Zhang at Columbia. She’ll be leading many efforts in the lab to understand the links between gene regulation and disease.

2/01/18: Welcome to the first official member of the lab Stephanie Lozano who will be a research tech based in the Basu Lab. Stephanie will be helping with all data collection related to single-cell RNA-seq!

12/11/17: Our LeafCutter manuscript is out in Nature Genetics.

12/08/17: Our manuscript on Parkinson’s disease has been posted on bioRxiv.

12/05/17: Our paper on iPSC and cardiomyocyte regulatory QTLs is out in Genome Research.

10/01/17: The Li lab is officially online, we are currently located in CLSC in space shared with Human Genetics.