Xiaojing Wang, PhD

Dr. Xiaojing Wang, PhD, is a research instructor of biomedical informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Wang has extensive experience with biological data, including sequencing data analysis and gene expression. Her research focuses on using such resources in parallel with shotgun proteomics data, an emerging field termed proteogenomics, to understand cancer biology. Her current projects include developing bioinformatics methods for proteogenomics studies and its application to human cancer studies. She is heavily involved in the CPTAC project and has close collaborations with the Jim Ayers Institute for Precancer Detection and Diagnosis led by Dr. Daniel C. Liebler. Dr. Wang pioneered the incorporation of transcriptomic data in mass spectrometry data analysis and interpretation. She creatively integrated the genomic data from The Cancer Genome Atlas project and thus built a communication channel between the two national efforts. Using colorectal cancer as a model, she identified protein level variants and other markers. Her approach has important clinical implications. After the publication of her paper in 2011 the proteomics community has highly appreciated her work, and similar analyses have been widely adopted. As part of the first CPTAC analysis working group, her analysis was highlighted in the iconic 2014 nature paper.

Dr. Wang received her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University.