Zhongwu Lai
Executive Director, Bioinformatics Data Science
Winchester, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZhongwu Lai is an executive leader in oncology bioinformatics with 11+ years steering translational genomics and NGS-driven mutation detection toward drug development at AstraZeneca, recently promoted to Executive Director. His career traces deep technical roots from Celera and ALTANA through senior scientific roles to strategic leadership, blending a PhD in Chemistry with an MS in Computer Science to bridge wet-lab insight and computational rigor. He has led multi-stage teams delivering clinically actionable variant interpretation and bioinformatics pipelines that directly inform oncology programs. Based in Winchester, MA, he is known for converting complex sequencing data into practical biomarkers and for advancing organizational capability in cancer informatics. An uncommon strength is his sustained progression within a single biopharma R&D organization, demonstrating both technical depth and long-term impact on pipeline decision-making.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityB.S. Chemistry, B.S. Chemistry at Peking UniversityPh.D. Chemistry, Ph.D. Chemistry at New York University
Github Skills (9)
python8
machine-learning7
java6
seq5
rna-seq4
genomics3
bioinformatics3
snakemake3
scalable2
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (4)
AstraZeneca-NGS/VarDict
Aug 2014 - Jan 2019
VarDict
Contributions:52 commits, 2 PRs, 33 pushes in 4 years 5 months
pythonmachine-learning
AstraZeneca-NGS/VarDictJava
May 2016 - Sep 2016
VarDict Java port
Contributions:2 commits, 2 pushes, 36 comments in 4 months
java
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