Jinghui Zhang

Jinghui Zhang, PhD is Chair of the Department of Computational Biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where she directs the bioinformatics analysis underpinning the most comprehensive genomic characterization of childhood cancers ever performed. She was a senior leader of the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project (PCGP)—the first paired tumor-germline whole-genome sequencing study of pediatric cancers—and has led analysis of the St. Jude Cloud, a freely accessible genomic data commons containing sequencing data from over 10,000 pediatric cancer patients. Her foundational contributions include developing widely adopted computational tools for somatic mutation calling (CREST, CICERO) and characterizing the landscape of structural variation, gene fusions, and noncoding regulatory mutations across childhood cancer types. The St. Jude Cloud platform she helps lead has enabled hundreds of research groups worldwide to perform pediatric cancer genomics studies without access to their own patient cohorts.