Dr. Chao Di is a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer and Scientist in the Rokita Lab and the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH).
Before starting at CNH, Dr. Di most recently worked as a Senior Computational Biology Scientist at Spark Therapeutics (Roche Group) where he developed and automated multiple production-scale pipelines. He developed an AAV vector integration analysis platform to enable the evaluation of insertion risks in gene therapy programs, optimized single-nucleus RNA-seq data analysis for profiling of rare cell types as well as target discovery, managed a spatial profiling workflow, and developed long-read sequencing pipelines for PacBio using Snakemake and Nextflow. Prior to his work at Spark, Dr. Di spent several years at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania developing bioinformatics workflows and insights for cancer, neurodegenerative, and infectious diseases using a wide array of specialized multi-omic data (XLIP-Seq, metagenomics, 4sU-Seq, EU-Seq, ChIP-Seq, scRNA-Seq, CyTOF, and Olink proteomics, to name a few).
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.
Dr. Di completed his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at China Agricultural University.
Outside of the lab, Chao cherishes spending time with his family, especially exploring parks, science museums, and weekend activities with his two curious and active school-age children. He finds joy in the everyday adventures of parenting and enjoys unwinding with a game of badminton or catching the latest soccer matches with friends and family.