Dr. Haibao Tang is a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), working on genome assembly, annotation, and analyses of plant genomes. He earned his Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia and continued on his postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley. During his Ph.D. and postdoctoral research, Dr. Tang devised novel computational methods to clarify the evolution of flowering plants. His method revealed deep genome duplication events and surprising properties of the early flowering plant genomes, and improved power to correlate homologous regions between the genomes of monocots and eudicots. His computational framework provides a basis for the in-silico reconstruction of the genome of the common ancestor for the flowering plants. Dr. Tang has a demonstrated record of developing novel and robust algorithms for comparing genome structures, some of which are implemented in the CoGe online comparative genomics platform currently hosted at iPlant. He has made significant contributions to the analysis of several plant genomes including papaya, sorghum, Medicago, Brassica and tomato. He is familiar with the mainstream genome assembly and annotation pipelines, which he is now applying to the broccoli, willow, and alfalfa data. Dr. Tang is also interested in the regulatory changes associated with the morphological transitions that have occurred during the domestication process of cereal crops, and have two pending patents for isolating genes responsible for important agronomic traits in the cereal crops.

Plant Biology