Dr. Jing Zhang received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Molecular and Computational Biology from the University of Southern California in 2012. She did her postdoc training in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program at Yale University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her main research focuses on developing computational and statistical methods to uncover the underlying principles of the multi-step and tightly coordinated gene regulation process and understand how genetic variations can result in phenotypic changes and even diseases. She is specifically interested in interpreting the noncoding regulome, where the overwhelming bulk of mutations – particularly those discovered from the recent large-scale genomics initiatives – lie in.