Prominent Scientist to Join CHOP in September, Launch Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine

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Yi Xing, PhD, an internationally prominent scientist in computational biology and genomics, will join Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) on Sept. 1 to establish a new center dedicated to harnessing big data and genomic technologies in discovering new treatment approaches for children’s health.

Dr. Xing, currently the Program Director of the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Graduate Program at the University of California Los Angeles, will serve as founder and Director of the Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine at CHOP. The center will bring together cutting-edge researchers in large-scale collaborative projects to advance a core strategic objective of CHOP’s: becoming the international leader in biological, genetic and biomedical data science to drive new discoveries relevant to child health and therapy development.

“We are very enthusiastic that Dr. Xing has chosen to continue his groundbreaking research program here,” said Bryan Wolf, MD, PhD, CHOP’s Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. "He is one of the premier investigators in this space, playing a pivotal role in developing new genomic technologies and computational methods, and leading collaborative studies aimed at understanding how our genome and its gene products contribute to development and disease.” Supported by multiple NIH grants, Dr. Xing’s research merges the fields of computational biology, biomedical data science, RNA genomics, human genetics, precision medicine and immuno-oncology.

Dr. Xing will hold the Francis West Lewis Chair in Computational and Genomic Medicine, a new chair that commemorates the physician who, with two co-founders, inaugurated CHOP as the nation’s first pediatric hospital in 1855. “We are thrilled that we were able to recruit Dr. Xing, and are confident that he and his faculty recruits will advance a highly important strategic objective of the CHOP Research Institute,” said Beverly Davidson, PhD, the Institute’s Chief Scientific Strategy Officer. Dr. Xing will also join the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Contact: The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,