Director of Data Visualization
Dr. Zhou received a B.S. in Biological Sciences in 2004, and a PhD in Plant Science in 2008, both at the China Agricultural University. He completed a postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. During these periods, he has published works on bioinformatics web services, later shifting focus to human genomics. He then joined St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as a staff researcher, where he is today. He created the ProteinPaint web tool for visualizing cancer genomics dataset, that is widely used by the research community. In 2019 he became the Director of Data Visualization, and in 2021, he joined the faculty as an assistant member. He leads the "ProteinPaint Team", a group of PhD scientists and software engineers. He collaborates with researchers in molecular biology, oncology, and population science, with goals of hosting and sharing domain datasets on the ProteinPaint web portal. He also leads efforts to integrate various ProteinPaint software features into the NCI GDC Data Portal, for GDC users to leverage the multi-modal data integration and visualization functions and explore the rich GDC dataset. The current software features and supported datasets can be found at https://proteinpaint.stjude.org/.