We are excited to welcome Dr. Xiao Fan to the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor.

Fan received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Alberta in 2016 and her bachelor’s in electronic information science and technology from the Ocean University of China.

Before joining the department, Fan worked at Columbia University as an associate research scientist in the labs of Drs. Wendy Chung and Yufeng Shen. Before that, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the cardiovascular department at the Mayo Clinic in the lab of Dr. Iftikhar Kullo.

Fan’s research seeks to improve the understanding of genetic, biological and medical questions using computational approaches. The research projects include the study of rare genetic diseases, interpretation of genetic variants, and characteristics of medical phenotypes. Her laboratory will focus on discovery of novel genes underlying diseases using case-control association studies, identification of pathogenic variants using machine learning methods, and trajectory prediction of medical phenotypes based on cellular, molecular and genetic data.

Fan is the recipient of the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, 2021-2026, Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Award, 2015, and the Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarship, 2014-2015.

She will be moving to Gainesville with her family this winter and starting January 2023.