Mission

Research

The three long-term goals of our research program are to:

• Understand the evolutionary processes that contribute to the variation in genome content within/between species,
• Uncover the mechanisms that underlie the translation of genomic and environmental information to phenotype, and
• Translate advances in computational and data sciences and machine learning approaches to assess and improve our understanding in biology.

Mentoring & teaching

By providing a collaborative, colleagial, and inclusive environment, we thrive to train the next generation scientists who are creative, critical, independent, and resourceful. Teaching-wise:

• At the graduate level, our core focus is on training students from diverse disciplines to be able to effectively communicate with each other about the significance, motivation, and background knowledge of their works.
• At the undregraduate level, we aim to train students to think as a scientist when assessing information, ranging from a scientific paper to a blog post.

Service to the community

We thrive to serve the scientific community by providing our expertise via reviews, workshops, and/or professional societies. We are also eager to reach out to the public with the goals to improve basic understanding of science, to demonstrate the relevance of our works to the society, and to cultivate intersts among pre-college students in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math through outreach activities.