Tingting Zhu is currently bioinformatics postdoctoral researcher at the University of California in Davis (USA). She works with Ming-Cheng Luo and Jan Dvorak.

After obtaining her BS in computer science, Tingting decided to follow her love of nature and moved to biology. She obtained a PhD – from the Chinese Academy of Sciences – on plant population and genome evolution. She now works as a bioinformatician, combining her two area of expertise in computer science and biology. “Being able to interpret the data into biological language is the most fun part of my research work,” she enthuses.

In her free time, Tingting loves to explore natural environments, observing plants and animals. She also likes travelling and reading, as well as meeting people from different cultures.

Tingting is involved in the NSF-funded project “Sequencing the Aegilops tauschii genome”. She develops tools for the newly emerged BioNano technology to construct pseudomolecules for the Ae. tauschii genome, the progenitor of the wheat D genome. Her research will contribute to the understanding of the Ae. tauschii genome content and structure, and will help unravel the underlying characteristics and evolutionary history of this wheat progenitor.

The IWGSC Early Carreer Award is for Tingting “an opportunity to present my work in an international scientific meeting to a broad range of audience and to share my experience or lessons to the community, who might benefit from our current work and who might also provide constructive suggestions for our future work.”

The IWGSC Award “brings me to the spotlight for the first time, letting the community get familiar with my work and myself. This will be an important step for my entire career and will help me establish the initial network within the community.”

In the future, Tingting would like to work on big data analysis. “The data is right there, all kinds of, everywhere, in pieces, and lack of organization, resulting to the ineffective utilization. That really fascinates me. ” Thus, apart from continuing her current project, she would like to work on finding ways to integrate these data so that they could be easily and effectively used.

More information

• Tingting presentation at PAG 2016 took place during the IWGSC workshop on Saturday 9 January at 9:55 am
• Tingting presentation was entitled: “Evolution of genome structure in polyploid wheat revealed by comparison of wheat and Aegilops tauschii whole­genome BioNano maps” Abstract