HONGKAI JI, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Department of Biostatistics

615 North Wolfe Street, Room E3638

Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

Phone: (410) 955-3517

Fax: (410) 955-0958

Email: hji@jhsph.edu

 

 

Hongkai Ji Lab

Welcome to Hongkai Ji’s Lab

The major research interest of our lab is computational biology. We are particularly interested in studying gene regulation and systems biology. Our research involves developing statistical methods to decipher cis-regulatory information from mammalian genomes. These include statistical tools to detect genomic regions where protein-DNA interactions occur, to discover transcription factor binding motifs, and to identify genes that function according to specific spatial and temporal patterns. By working together with collaborators from Prof. Wing H. Wong’s Lab and Prof. Andrew P. McMahon’s Lab, we have applied these methods to studying gene regulation in mouse Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) signaling pathway. We have discovered dozens of novel enhancers and genes targeted by transcription factor GLI. Currently we are scaling the study to a genome-scale by performing global ChIP-chip, ChIP-seq, microarray and exon array analyses. Our long term goal is to establish effective and efficient statistical strategies that allow us to reconstruct mammalian gene regulatory networks through synthesizing information from gene expression, protein-DNA interactions, protein-protein interactions, genome sequences, transcription factor binding motifs and existing knowledge on signaling and metabolic pathways. Knowledge of these networks will serve as the basis for us to understand human development and disease.