Zechen Chong
Assistant Professor at UAB School of Medicine
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZechen Chong is an Assistant Professor and bioinformatician with 14+ years of experience specializing in genomics, cancer genomics, epigenomics, and population genomics. He blends computer science training with deep NGS expertise, having developed widely used tools such as Rainbow for RAD-seq clustering and novoBreak for structural-variation detection, which ranked first in multiple ICGC-TCGA DREAM challenges. His work spans WGS, WES, RNA-seq, and ChIP-seq analyses, producing peer-reviewed publications and translating methods into robust software. Trained at the Beijing Institute of Genomics and seasoned by a postdoc at MD Anderson, he operates at the intersection of biotechnology and informatics to push practical NGS methods forward. Based in Birmingham at UAB School of Medicine, he runs an active lab (Chong Lab) that applies algorithmic rigor to real-world cancer genomics problems. An interesting detail: he started in computer science and has maintained a strong software-first approach to biological questions, enabling high-performance tools that have stood out in community benchmarking.
14 years of coding experience
Master's degree, Bioinformatics, population genetics, Genomics, Master's degree, Bioinformatics, population genetics, Genomics at Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of SciencesBachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology
English, Chinese
Github Skills (8)
bioinformatics10
conda10
package-management10
bioconda10
genome-assembly9
assembly7
genome3
sequence-alignment2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
ChongLab/Inspector
Apr 2021 - Jan 2022
A tool for evaluate long-read de novo assembly results
Contributions:10 releases, 10 commits, 3 PRs in 9 months
evaluatede-novo-assemblygenome-assemblylongde-novo
czc/bioconda-recipes
Jan 2022 - Aug 2024
Conda recipes for the bioconda channel.
Contributions:30 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 7 months
biocondabioinformaticsrecipesconda
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.