My research interests include computational biology and bioinformatics with a special focus on microbial genomics and functional genomics. As the first author or corresponding author, I have published 68 peer-reviewed papers in international journals, including Nucleic acids research, PNAS, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics, and two book chapters in Methods in Molecular Biology. I have developed web-based systems, such as Ori-Finder for the prediction of replication origins (oriCs) in microbial genomes, and GC-Profile for the visualization and analysis of GC content variation in genomic sequences. I also constructed online databases, such as DoriC, a database of oriC regions in both bacterial and archaeal genomes, DeOri, a database of eukaryotic DNA replication origins and DEG 15, an update of the Database of Essential Genes. Now, some of them are very popular with scientists in related fields. For example, Ori-Finder, which is cited over 220 times according to Web of Science, has been applied to annotate oriCs in hundreds of newly sequenced prokaryotic genomes including those published in Cell (Hackl et al., Cell, 2023) , Nature (Graf et al., Nature, 2021) and Nature Microbiology (Needham et al., Nature Microbiology, 2022), and has also been referred as software tool to identify replichores (Wannier et al., Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 2021). Currently, the predicted replication origins in dozens of bacteria and archaea have been confirmed by experiments, and our predictions have also been supported by the studies published in Science (Korem et al., Science, 2015) and Nature (Richardson et al., Nature, 2016).

I obtained my Ph.D degree from Tianjin University in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Chun-Ting Zhang, a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Then, I worked at Tianjin University as the principal investigator of the Center of Bioinformatics, Tianjin University (TUBIC) (http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/ or http://tubic.org/). In the past years, I have taken charge of six research projects funded by NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China) or MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China) in succession. I once received China Youth Science and Technology Innovation Award (2006), the nomination award for the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China (2009) and was selected into the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in Universities (Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2012).

Currently, I am a Faculty Member of Faculty Opinions (formerly F1000Prime) for Genomics & Genetics, the editorial board member of Genome Biology, Briefings in Bioinformatics, Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, iMeta, Scientific Reports, BMC Microbiology, Microbiology Spectrum, PLoS ONE, Associate Editor of Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences  and Frontiers in Microbiology. I have recieved the Distinquished Editorial Board Member Award (2003-2023) from Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics (GPB), Outstanding Editor Award from Frontiers in Microbiology, and PLOS ONE Long Service Award.

I have served as Guest Editor for Frontiers in Microbiology by organizing the research topic 'DNA Replication Origins in Microbial Genomes' , its Volume II and Volume III. Gratifyingly, the articles published in this topic series were highly accessed. I also hosted a themed issue 'Recent developments of software and database in microbial genomics and functional genomics' for Briefings in Bioinformatics. The thirteen articles in this themed issue have been well-received by a wide international audience, and have been cited over 5300 times according to Web of Science. Recently, I hosted a special issue on 'Artificial Intelligence in Omics' for Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics as Guest Editor. Currently, I serve as Guest Editor of Scientific Reports for the Collection 'Pangenomics'.

For more details, please refer to https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/1506509 or https://tubic.org/