Christine S. Cheng is an associate professor in the Informatics group at JCVI’s La Jolla Campus. After completing her doctoral research, Dr. Cheng did her postdoctoral training with Dr. Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Cheng’s laboratory at JCVI includes both wet-lab (experimental) and dry-lab (computational) research. Dr. Cheng’s research program studies transcriptional regulatory networks and aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of how aberrant regulatory circuits contribute to human disease.

Dr. Cheng’s lab utilizes single-cell, droplet-based technology enabled by a microfluidic device to simultaneously profile the transcriptome and epigenome of thousands of single cells at the same time. The main focus of her lab is to utilize single cell resolution functional genomic assays and computational methods to study heterogeneous clinical tissue samples and blood immune cell populations in patient samples.

Current projects focus on applying single-cell transcriptomics and epigenetics in Alzheimer’s disease and opioid use disorder patient samples, with the goal of finding diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets.

Dr. Cheng received her master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and she received her doctorate degree in bioinformatics and systems biology from University of California, San Diego.

Publications