The Ph.D. student from Dr. Jim Hu’s group, I-Fan Wu (Peter), was selected to be the recipient of the prestigious Heep Fellowship in the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering (IQSE) at Texas A&M University for the FY19 Term.
Peter’s Ph.D. research focuses on ontology based phenotypic profiling for microbial genetics. In parallel with the explosion of genomics sequencing data, high-throughput microbial phenotype data have been published at an unprecedented rate these years. However, the proper way to capture them in interoperable databases is still in its infancy. Borrowing the concept from information science, an Ontology — a tree-like and structured way of storing data — has been established for connecting microbial phenotypes across species. By the aid of MediaWiki, the software that runs the renowned Wikipedia, Peter’s research aims to curate those phenotype data to satisfy search queries from the general scientific community, and to explore the potential of using these data to build prediction models to compare genes at the functional level. More about Peter’s research can be seen at: https://