As biology turns increasingly into a data-rich science, the massive amount of data generated by high-throughput technologies present both new opportunities and serious challenges. As a bioinformatician, Dr. Ge Gao is interested in developing novel computational technologies to analyze, integrate and visualize high-throughput biological data effectively and efficiently, with applications to decipher and understand the function and evolution of gene regulatory systems. Since 2011, when he was first recruited as a Principal Investigator (tenure-track) by Peking University, Dr. Gao has developed fourteen online bioinformatic software tools and databases for efficient analyses of large-scale omics data. More than 1.5 billion hits for these resources as well as 10,000+ citations for 30+ published peer-reviewed papers from world-wide research community during past five years well demonstrates their global significance and impact. Taking advantage of these powerful bioinformatics technical infrastructures, Dr. Gao has been delineating the regulatory map and characterizing the functional genome in action globally. Dr. Gao is an active member of global bioinformatic society. He has been elected as a member of Executive Committee and the China Liaison for Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNET) since 2011, and the Vice President on Education during 2016 and 2018. He is also a Founding Member of Expert Committee for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Chinese Society of Biotechnology (established in 2014), as well as of Expert Committee for Big Data and Biocuration, Genetics Society of China (established in 2015). His academic achievement has been well recognized through the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, the Elsevier Chinese Most Cited Researchers, the Bayer Investigator Award, the Cheung Kong Scholar and the National Top-notch Young Professionals programs. In the coming years, Dr. Gao will continue his scientific pursuit to decipher the “coded messages” in genomes with cutting-edge bioinformatic and genomic technology. Furthermore, as an integral part of BIOPIC, the Gao lab will continue contributing to the overall success of BIOPIC through collaborations and education.

Selected Publications

1. Xia C.R., Cao Z.J., Tu X.M., Gao G*. 2023. Spatial-linked alignment tool (SLAT) for aligning heterogenous slices. Nat Commun 14(1): 7236. (Editors’ Highlights)
2. Cao Z.J. and Gao G*. 2022. Multi-omics single-cell data integration and regulatory inference with graph-linked embedding. Nat Biotechnol 40(10): 1458-1466.
3. Tu X.M., Cao Z.J., Xia C.R., Mostafavi S., Gao G*. 2022. Cross-Linked Unified Embedding for cross-modality representation learning. In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022, Featured as Oral/Top 5% Papers).
4. Cao Z.J., Wei L., Lu S., Yang D.C., Gao G*. 2020. Searching large-scale scRNA-seq databases via unbiased cell embedding with Cell BLAST. Nat Commun 11(1): 3458.
5. Jiang S., Cheng S. J., Ren L. C., ..., Liang N., Gao G*. 2019. An expanded landscape of human long noncoding RNA. Nucleic Acids Res. 47(15): 7842-7856.