Qiang Wei

Qiang Wei, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Research Instructor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His research focuses on computational and systems biology approaches to study genomic and epigenomic mechanisms in cancer, drug response prediction, and disease risk gene prioritization. He has pioneered integrative frameworks combining multi-omics data (genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics) with clinical information for precision medicine applications.

Key research areas include:

• Developing computational tools for analyzing non-coding variants and DNA methylation patterns
• Characterizing tumor heterogeneity through circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumor cells (CTCs)
• Identifying genomic drivers of therapy resistance in metastatic cancers
• Integrating GWAS data with functional genomics for disease mechanism discovery

His work spans multiple cancer types including breast, prostate, and hepatocellular carcinoma, with a particular emphasis on translating genomic insights into clinical diagnostics and therapeutic strategies. Ongoing projects include optimizing liquid biopsy approaches for early cancer detection and leveraging single-cell technologies to understand tumor evolution.

In recent years, his lab has developed novel algorithms like TVAR for functional variant analysis and Bayesian frameworks for multi-omics integration. These methods have been applied to study schizophrenia genetics, autism risk genes, and platelet reactivity regulation.