Lab updates
Publications, awards, talks, and new members from the Wei Li Lab.
Browse recent highlights below or open the archive for earlier lab news.
Latest
2026
August. Our VST VAE model paper was accepted by Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal (CSBJ). Congratulations to Pamela Chansky, Mike Keller, Catherine Bollard, and all the authors.
July. Our collaborative single-cell CRISPR screen study of stem cell pluripotency transitions was published in Stem Cell Reports. Congratulations to all the authors, especially Jin Zhang and Lin Yang.
June. Together with Margaret McCarthy and Alexandros Poulopoulos at UMB, we received a UMB Research Infrastructure Investment Grant.
March. Wei gave an invited talk at Perturb 2026 in Vienna, Austria. Our pertTF modeling manuscript is also available on bioRxiv.
February. Wei gave an invited talk on functional genomics in HIV research at CROI 2026. A collaborative paper with Yarui Diao’s group at Duke describing scHiCAR was published in Nature Biotechnology. A report in the same journal also quoted our perspective on using protein language models to develop genome engineering tools.
January. Our study of the three-dimensional genome during neutrophil differentiation was published in Genome Biology. Congratulations to all the authors, including Qing Chen and Minglei Shi.
2025
- December. Alon Katz joined as a rotating student in the UMD BISI program, and Sam Boccara joined as a UMD computer science undergraduate. Wei became an affiliate faculty member in the UMD Biological Sciences Graduate Program. Rhema was accepted to Johns Hopkins. Our multi-omics and network analysis study of neutrophil differentiation was accepted by Genome Biology. Congratulations to Qing Chen, Minglei Shi, Cheng Li, and all collaborators.
- November. Pamela Chansky successfully defended her PhD. Congratulations, Pamela.
- October. Together with Baoxu Pang and Qiang Wu, we organized the first Cold Spring Harbor Asia CRISPR course. Vipin served as a teaching assistant.
- July. Diana Zhu from UMD, Bharath Kumar from UMBC, Ethan Teng from Urbana High School, and Rhema Du from Winston Churchill High School joined the lab as interns. A single-cell brain tumor analysis grant led by Yuan Zhu at UTSW, with Wei Li and Petr Baranov at Harvard, was funded by the Gilbert Family Foundation.
- June. Yangqi Su joined the lab as a computational postdoctoral researcher.
- April. The lab moved to the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Institute for Health Computing. Our review was published in Frontiers in Genome Editing. Congratulations to Vipin and the other authors.
- February. Our PS study was published in Nature Cell Biology alongside the Satija lab’s Mixscape study. Congratulations to all the authors.
- January. Xiangyun Li joined the Gene Editing Core as a technician. Ishnoor Bakshi, Diksha Siriam, Muskan Manchanda, and Sanya Palawat joined a team for the GWU AMPC Research Symposium. Zach Eliason began a lab rotation. Together with Irene Zohn at Children’s National, we received a pilot award from the District of Columbia Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center.
Earlier highlights
2024
- October. Wei served as a referee for the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search. The lab also gathered for dinner to celebrate the year’s achievements.
- September. Jane Ulianova began a rotation in the lab.
- August. Our PS model manuscript was accepted by Nature Cell Biology. Congratulations to Bicna, Xiaolong, Lumen, and all coauthors.
- July. Wei gave an invited talk at a virtual workshop hosted by the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems.
- June. Diana Zhu joined as an undergraduate intern, and Vipin Menon joined as a computational postdoctoral researcher. Wei was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Children’s National and GWU, effective July 1.
- May. Bicna welcomed a new baby.
- April. Wei joined the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology as an academic editor. Pamela, Lumen, and Wei attended the ASGCT annual meeting in Baltimore. Pamela presented a poster on a VAE model, and Wei spoke about recent Cas13 work. Wei also gave a talk at the STATGEN 2024 meeting in Pittsburgh.
- March. Aravind Meyyappan joined as a rotating GWU IBS PhD student.
- January. We received a Virginia Tech and Children’s National research collaboration award on AI with Jia-Ray Yu. Wei became adjunct faculty at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech.
2023
- November. The PS model manuscript was posted on bioRxiv.
- October. Our Nature Methods News and Views and Nature Biomedical Engineering study were published, with coverage from GEN and a Research Briefing.
- September. Our collaborative NELFB study was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
- August. The lab joined the IGVF Consortium as an affiliate. Our News and Views article was accepted by Nature Methods.
- July. We launched the Gene Editing Core and held a farewell lunch for Xiaolong.
- June. Wei received a DC Center for AIDS Research Transitioning Investigator Award for work on HIV latency.
- May. Our study of intrinsic host RNA targeting by Cas13 was accepted by Nature Biomedical Engineering.
- April. Daniall Masood and Li-Ting Wang joined the lab. An NHLBI R01 with Hanrui Zhang and Edoardo Marcora was awarded under grant R01HL168174.
- February. Our DeepCas13 study was published in Nature Communications, with a report from Children’s National. Pamela Chansky received a Cosmos Club Foundation Scholars Award.
Wei Li Lab 