Elizabeth (Hye-Jung) Chun

Elizabeth Chun is Associate Director of the Data Analysis Center (DAC) for the NIH-funded Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues (SMaHT) Network in the Park Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She oversees multidisciplinary teams of software engineers, bioinformatics scientists, and computational biologists in the development and operation of cloud-based infrastructure, computational pipelines, and SMaHT Data Portal that support petabyte-scale genomics research across the SMaHT Network, enabling collaborative genomics research through scalable computational solutions, establishing data standards and quality-control frameworks, and supporting the collection, analysis, visualization, and dissemination of data, while advancing best practices in data stewardship and governance.

Elizabeth received her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia, where she investigated the molecular basis of pediatric malignant rhabdoid tumors through integrative analyses of whole-genome sequencing, transcriptomics, DNA methylation, and chromatin profiling (Chun et al., Cancer Cell, 2016; Chun et al., Cell Reports, 2019). She subsequently continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow, applying long-read sequencing technologies to investigate the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying pediatric cancers. Prior to joining the Park Laboratory in 2022, Elizabeth worked as a computational biologist at Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, contributing to several large genomics initiatives, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET; equivalent to pediatric TCGA), and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s Development of Highly Active Anti-Leukemia Stem Cell Therapy (CIRM-HALT) program.