Lead Bioinformatician Team

The Lead Bioinformatician (LB) team consists of eight highly skilled bioinformatician experts. Their responsibilities include creating strategic plans, developing operational solutions, supervising the Bioinformatician Engineer (BE) team, and addressing the most challenging problems faced by our clients.

Justin T. Li, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. Justin holds a B.S. in Biophysics, an M.S. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology. Prior to joining AccuraScience in June 2013, Justin served as Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota and Chief Bioinformaticis Officer at LC Sciences (Houston). Throughout his career, Justin has published over 40 research articles and developed 12 bioinformatics databases and web servers, including miRecords, siRecords, siDRM, dbCRID, SVRMHC and PepCyber:PPEP). As Principal Investigator, he has also secured approximately $1.8M in research funding from NIH and other agencies.

Alberto Riva, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. Alterto holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering. Alberto is an expert in bioinformatics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and medical informatics. He has held faculty positions at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, and the Genetics Institute at the University of Florida. Alberto joined AccuraScience in January 2014 and has published approximately 40 peer-reviewed papers and 3 book chapters. His work focuses on developing computational tools and methods for genomics and translational research, and he has designed and implemented numerous web-based and standalone applications for various research areas, including the study of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, transcription factor binding sites, NGS and RNA-seq analysis, and genome-wide association studies. Alberto is also skilled in high-performance computing infrastructure and in designing software that facilitates HPC applications in bioinformatics.

Tom Xu, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. Tom holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology. Tom is an expert in the complex functional and statistical analysis of biological data. Prior to joining AccuraScience in June 2013, he worked as a Computational Genomics Specialist at the University of Minnesota and has been an adjunct faculty member there since January 2012. As a Computational Genomics Specialist, Tom supported researchers in NGS experimental design and data analysis, collaborated on research projects and grant proposals, and provided tutorials and workshops on NGS applications and analyses. He has published over 15 research articles related to NGS and genomics in the past three years and is skilled in various domains, including RNA-seq, whole-genome and targeted resequencing, ChIP-seq, eQTL, splicing, gene fusion, genome assembly, epigenetics/epigenomics, and metagenomics.

King Jordan. Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. King holds a B.A. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Genetics. King is a leading researcher on the influence of transposable elements on the structure, function, and evolution of eukaryotic genomes. He is also dedicated to developing and applying algorithms for functional genomics analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. Prior to joining AccuraScience in January 2014, King worked at the National Center for Biotechnology Information for six years and held an associate professor appointment in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech, where he served as co-director of the PanAmerican Bioinformatics Institute. He has published 95 research publications since 1996 and developed 7 software packages for NGS and functional genomics analysis.

Zack J. Tu, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. Zack holds a B.S. in Biochemistry, an M.S. in Software System, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology. Zack is a computational genomics expert with extensive experience providing informatics and computational support to many research laboratories. Prior to joining AccuraScience in June 2013, he oversaw the setup and operation of the main computational and bioinformatics infrastructure at the University of Minnesota's research sequencing center and participated in the operation of a clinical genome sequencing facility. Zack has been working with NGS data analysis since 2006 and has extensive experience with data generated from Roche/454, Illumina, and Ion Torrent platforms. His areas of expertise include genome assembly and characterization, RNA-seq, computational simulation of variant detection, somatic and germline SNV and Indel analysis, and clinical interpretation of identified variants.

William W. Gong, Ph.D., Lead Bioinformatician. William holds a B.S. in Biology, an M.S. in Zoology, and a Ph.D. in Genomics and Bioinformatics. William is an expert in statistical modeling of high-dimensional biological data, including Bayesian inference-based modeling, kernel machine, and deep learning. He is also proficient in the parallel computing environment MPI and MapReduce. Prior to joining AccuraScience in June 2013, William worked as a bioinformatician at the University of Minnesota. His areas of expertise include whole-genome, exome, and other targeted resequencing, ChIP-seq, repeated element analysis, miRNA target analysis, epigenomics, network analysis, functional annotation, and integrating heterogeneous biological information. "

Thomas Girke, Ph.D., Ad Hoc Lead Bioinformatician. Thomas holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Thomas is an Associate Professor and Director of the Bioinformatics Facility at the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on developing computational data analysis methods for genome biology and small molecule discovery, including discovery-oriented data mining projects and algorithm and software development projects for data from various high-throughput technologies such as NGS, genome-wide profiling approaches, and chemical genomics. Thomas has published 58 research articles between 1998 and 2013 and is the main instructor of a successful workshop program on high-throughput data analysis using R and Bioconductor resources. He joined AccuraScience as an Ad Hoc Lead Bioinformatician in January 2014.

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