Research Interests and Accomplishments

Dr. Yu “Max” Qian is an assistant professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He specializes in flow cytometry (FCM) informatics. He was the primary algorithm designer and one of the leading developers of the FCM component of ImmPort, the NIAID/DAIT-funded immunology database and analysis portal. As an informatics researcher, he leads and/or co-develops a suite of standards, models, algorithms, and software systems for computational FCM data analysis, including FLOCK, FCSTrans, FuGEFlow, MIFlowCyt, and GenePattern FCM suite. These systems have been used by informatics researchers and immunologists to improve the management of experiment metadata, explore cellular phenotypic profiles, identify novel cell subsets, and quantify immune responses to clinical treatments.

Dr. Qian has been trained in diversified fields of informatics. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2006, and an M.E. and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University, in 2001 and 1998, respectively. After Ph.D. graduation, he joined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (UT Southwestern) as a postdoctoral senior research associate, where he was trained on immunology informatics, bioinformatics, and clinical informatics. He was appointed as an assistant professor of Department of Clinical Sciences and Department of Pathology of UT Southwestern in 2010. Before joining JCVI in 2013, he was leading the natural language processing project at Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI), Parkland Health and Hospital System at Dallas on real-time disease identification for re-admission reduction. At JCVI, one of his ongoing projects is developing advanced analytical cyber-infrastructures to support integrative management of heterogeneous data and parallel running of analytical workflows through active collaborations with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Besides research activities, he had taught classes on applied bioinformatics and DNA microarray data analysis.

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