Co-Lead, Model and Data Sharing Core, MISM
Asst. Professor in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke
Zhicheng (Jason) Ji, PhD, Co-Investigator, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Duke University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics and his Master of Science in Engineering Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and has training in biostatistics and computer science, as well as expertise in genomics, computational biology, statistical modeling, machine learning, and big data analytics. Dr. Ji’s research focuses on developing innovative statistical and computational methods for analyzing large, complex genomic datasets, particularly those from single-cell sequencing. He designs user-friendly software tools to deliver these analytical methods to the scientific community (e.g., TSCAN). Dr. Ji applies these tools to study gene expression and gene regulatory programs in immunology, cancer, and neurology, leading to multiple publications in high-profile journals. He is now interested in developing new methods integrating large-scale genomic data to understand the immune response to different antigens.
Dr. Ji has recently identified new applications of large language models (LLMs) in genomic research, including serving as a genomic knowledge hub, performing cell-type annotation on single-cell RNA-seq data, classifying biomedical images, and generating programming code. He will lead the development of innovative LLM-based AI agents to navigate and harness models and data in immunology research for the MISM Model and Data Sharing Core.