Hangnoh Joseph Lee, PhD

• Korea University (Seoul, Korea), BSc, Life Sciences, 2004
• Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, PhD, Cell and Developmental Biology, 2011
• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney diseases, National Institutes of Health, Visiting Fellow, 2011 - 2016
• Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Research Fellow, 2016 - 2019

Dr. Lee is an expert in bioinformatics and genomics with a research focus on developing computational frameworks for precision disease modeling. Precision disease modeling aims to create animal models with the exact genetic variants found in patients. Leveraging his expertise in human and model animal genetics and genomics, Dr. Lee conducts comprehensive analyses of large human and animal datasets. His work includes evaluating disease-associated human gene variants obtained from exome or whole-genome sequencing data, systematically assessing the feasibility of modeling specific variants in various model organisms, and analyzing the results to ensure successful animal model characterization.

In line with his interest in precision disease modeling, Dr. Lee's goal is to advance comparative network biology between humans and model organisms to improve human disease modeling in animals. He has been an integral part of the development of gene regulatory network inference algorithms that can infer "context-specific" gene networks using network component analysis and collaborative filtering recommender systems. Dr. Lee integrates these algorithms with his extensive experience in comparative genomics and transcriptomics to enable the community to generate more effective patient-specific animal models.

Dr. Lee also has a particular interest in modeling and predicting the biological effects of aneuploidy and DNA copy number variations. His long-term research has focused on understanding the biological consequences of such numerical changes in the genome, which are often associated with miscarriage, neurological disorders, and various rare diseases. Dr. Lee has demonstrated how changes in gene dosage can disrupt gene interaction networks and continues to explore this area of study.

Precision Disease Modeling, Aneuploidy, Copy Number Variation, Gene Network Inference, Genomics, Bioinformatics, Transcriptomics, Comparative Genomics, Drosophila melanogaster, Human Disease Models

• Lee H, McManus CJ, Cho D-Y, Eaton M, Renda F, Somma MP, Cherbas L, May G, Powell S, Zhang D, Zhan L, Resch A, Andrews J, Celniker SE, Cherbas P, Przytycka TM, Gatti M, Oliver B, Graveley B, and MacAlpine D. DNA copy number evolution in Drosophila cell lines. Genome Biology, 2014; 15: R70
• Lee H, Cho D-Y, Whitworth C, Eisman R, Phelps M, Roote J, Kaufman T, Cook K, Russell S, Przytycka T, and Oliver B. Effects of gene dose, chromatin, and network topology on expression in Drosophila melanogaster. PLOS Genetics, 2016; 12(9): e1006295.
• Zhu J-Y, Lee J-G, van de Leemput J, Lee H, and Han Z. Functional analysis of SARS-CoV-2 proteins in Drosophila identifies Orf6-induced pathogenic effects with Selinexor as an effective treatment. Cell Bioscience, 2021; 11(1):59
• Wang Y*, Lee H*, Fear JM*, Berger I, Oliver B, Przytycka TM. NetREX-CF integrates incomplete transcription factor data with gene expression to reconstruct gene regulatory networks. Communications Biology, 2022 Nov 23;5(1):1282 (*co-first authors)