Dr. Chao Di joins the Rokita Lab and Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core!
We are excited to welcome Dr. Chao Di as a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer and Scientist in the Rokita Lab and the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.
Chao brings more than a decade of experience developing computational methods and production-scale pipelines for multi-omics analysis across academic, clinical, and industry settings. Most recently, Chao was a Senior Computational Biology Scientist at Spark Therapeutics (Roche Group), where he developed an internal AAV vector integration analysis platform to evaluate insertion risks in gene therapy programs, optimized single-nucleus RNA-seq analysis for rare cell types, and led long-read sequencing and spatial profiling workflows.
Before his time in industry, Chao worked at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania, where he contributed to high-impact studies in immunology, cancer biology, infectious diseases, and neurodegeneration. His toolkit spans cutting-edge transcriptomics and proteomics platforms including XLIP-Seq, 4sU-Seq, ChIP-Seq, scRNA-Seq, CyTOF, and Olink — all supported by deep experience in pipeline development with Snakemake, Nextflow, Python, R, and cloud/HPC environments. Earlier in his career, he helped build CLIPdb and contributed to foundational ENCODE efforts on RNA-binding proteins and long non-coding RNAs.
Chao is passionate about applying data science and engineering to tackle big data challenges in biomedical research. He thrives at the intersection of biology and computation, building scalable pipelines and analytical frameworks to extract insights from single-cell, spatial, and multi-omics datasets. At CNH, he’s excited to collaborate across teams to transform complex data into actionable discoveries for pediatric care.
We’re thrilled to have Chao on board as we continue building a robust analytical infrastructure to drive discovery and precision medicine in pediatric brain tumor research here at Children’s. Welcome, Chao! 👏