Xin He, Principal Investigator
xinhe@uchicago.edu

Xin is Professor in Dep. of Human Genetics at Univ. of Chicago. Xin completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2009 at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he worked with Saurabh Sinha. Before his current position, Xin completed postdoc training with Dr. Hao Li at Department of Biochemistry of UCSF, and with Drs. Kathryn Roeder and Ziv Bar-Joseph at Lane Center for Computational Biology of Carnegie Mellon University. Xin is interested in statistical genetics and genomics, computational biology/bioinformatics and evolutionary genomics.

Kevin Luo, Staff Scientist
kaixuan@uchicago.edu

Kevin (Kaixuan罗凯旋) Luo completed his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in 2016 from Duke University, where he was supervised by Dr. Alex Hartemink, and collaborated with Greg Crawford, David MacAlpine, and Li Ma. His PhD research focused on modeling the dynamics of genome-wide transcription factor and nucleosome occupancy. Kevin joined the lab in October, 2016. Kevin is interested in developing statistical and machine learning methods to better understand the mechanisms by which genetic variation impacts gene regulation.

Lifan Liang, Postdoc
lifanl@uchicago.edu

Lifan Liang (梁力凡) received his PhD in Biomedical Informatics in 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh, advised by Dr. Songjian Lu. His PhD research focused on modeling biological mechanisms in cancer with machine learning methods. Lifan joined the lab in November, 2021. He is interested in single cell genomics and statistical genetics.

Xiaotong Sun, Postdoc
sxt1229@uchicago.edu

Xiaotong Sun (孙晓彤) received her PhD from Peking University in China. She was a visiting student from 2019 to 2021, and joined the lab as a postdoc in April, 2022. Xiaotong's PhD work focused on identifying disease-causing biological pathways. Her current projects aim at integrating single-cell genomic data with human genetic studies.

Jing Gu, PhD student
jinggu@uchicago.edu

Jing received her BS and MS in Biochemistry from UC San Diego, and started the PhD program in Genetics, Genomics and System Biology at the University of Chicago in 2019. She joined the lab in September, 2020. She is interested in using statistical methods to integrate molecular traits and genetic associations to better understand complex disease etiology.

Sheng Qian, PhD student
shengqian@uchicago.edu

Sheng Qian obtained his BS in Biometry & Statistics from Cornell University and in Applied Bioscience from Zhejiang University jointly in 2019. He joined the lab in July, 2019 as a research assistant, and then joined Human Genetics PhD program in 2020, and the lab in 2021. Sheng's project focused on discovery risk genes from human genetic association studies.

Zicheng Wang, PhD student
zichengwang@uchicago.edu

Zicheng obtained his MS in Computational Biology from Harvard. He is a PhD student in the Human Genetics program and joined the lab in 2023. Zicheng is interested in the development and application of statistical methods in human genetics.

Ethan Zhong, PhD student
xzhong999@uchicago.edu

Ethan (Xiaoyuan) is a Human Genetics graduate student who joined the lab in 2022, working closely with Prof. Carole Ober. Before coming to Chicago, he studied economics, applied math, and statistics at UW-Madison. He is interested in using computational approaches to better understand genetic variations related to the onset and progression of human diseases.

Alexander Chen, PhD student
awchen55@uchicago.edu

Alexander holds an MS in Statistics from the University of Chicago and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently a PhD student in the Genetics, Genomics, and Systems Biology program, having joined the lab in 2024. He is jointly supervised by Dr. Yoav Gilad. His research interests focus on developing statistical methods to study biological robustness using single-cell genomics data.

Riley Xin, PhD student
xinr@uchicago.edu

Riley (Ruiqi Xin) joined the UChicago GGSB program in 2024 after studying Computational Biology and Data Science at UCLA. She is interested in developing and applying methods to uncover regulatory pathways linking DNA to phenotypes, with broad interests in statistics and machine learning.

Kole Butterer, Research assistant
kbutterer@uchicago.edu

Kole completed his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics at Northwestern University in 2023. His undergraduate projects focused on rates of convergence for random walks and ergodic theory. Before joining the He lab, he worked in Andrew Miri’s lab at Northwestern uncovering the neural dynamics of self-initiated movements. His project focuses on using machine learning and chromatin accessibility data to untangle gene regulation. He also works with Prof. Yuval Simons where he aims to predict the effects of explosive human population growth using rare variants.

Manya Lalwani, Undergraduate student
mlalwani@uchicago.edu

Manya Lalwani is a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. She is majoring in Biochemistry and Data Science, and hopes to pursue graduate schooling in Bioinformatics. She joined the lab as a research assistant in April, 2025. Her research interests include developing and using computational methods to understand the genetic basis of diseases.