Yongqun "Oliver" He, D.V.M., Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine (Dr. He's Biopage), Department of Microbiology and immunology (Dr. He's Biopage), Center for Comput. Med. & Bioinformatics (Dr. He's Biopage), and Comprehensive Cancer Center (Dr. He's membership), University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Background: B.S. in Veterinary Medicine (equivalent to DVM in US), Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China. 1986-1991 Assistant Veterinarian (licensed) and scientist, Beijing Xijiao Livestock & Poultry Company, Beijing, China. 1991-1993 M.S., Infectious Diseases & Veterinary Preventive Medicine, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China. 1993-1996 Ph.D., Molecular Immunology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, VA, USA. 1996-2000 Postdoc, Molecular Immunology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA. 2000-2001 M.S., Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA. 2000-2002 Senior Research Associate, Bioinformatics & Molecular Immunology, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Blacksburg, VA, USA. 2002-2005 Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Medical School. 2005-2011 Associate Professor (with tenure), University of Michigan Medical School, effective September 1, 2011

Research:

Dr. He's laboratory research has two major thrusts: (1) Wet-lab Brucella microbiology and immunology research, and (2) Dry-lab bioinformatics research. Our primary research theme is to understand pathogenesis and immunology of infectious diseases and develop vaccines against intracellular pathogens.

Brucella spp.are Gram-negative, facultative intracellular bacteria that cause chronic brucellosis in various animals and humans. Human brucellosis remains one of the commonest zoonotic diseases worldwide with more than 500,000 new cases annually. Treatment of brucellosis is very difficult. Presently there is still no safe and effective Brucella vaccine available for human use. Dr. He's wet-lab Brucella research focuses on understanding of Brucella pathogenesis and vaccine-induced protective immunity in host against virulent Brucella. He laboratory is also developing effective and safe Brucella vaccines with an aim for eventual human use. Bioinformatics approaches are also being applied to study Brucella pathogenesis and predict Brucella vaccine candidates.

Dr. He's primary bioinformatics research focuses on the development of database and analysis systems to study host-pathogen interactions and vaccines against infectious diseases. Different bioinformatics methods, including Bayesian network modeling, microarray data analysis, and literature mining, are also being studied to analyze biological networks (e.g., apoptosis). He group has developed several web-based software programs for these purposes. Dr. He is leading the development of the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO). This ontology can be used in many applications, such as vaccine data integration and literature mining. These bioinformatics approaches are being explored to study Brucella and other infectious pathogens important for public health.

More specific research projects are described Here.

Teaching:

• Fall 2006: Microbial Genomics (Micro 619, Co-instructor)
• Winter 2008: Bioinformatics on the Web (Bioinfo 800.006, Instructor)
• Fall 2008: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Bioinfo 527) (Teacher: Genomics/comparative genomics)
• Fall 2008, Winter 2011 and 2012: Molecular Biology in Laboratory Animal Medicine (Invited Speaker: Microarray technology)
• Winter 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012: Vaccines in Public Health (EPID 609) (Invited Speaker: Reverse vaccinology and ontology-based information network to support vaccine research)
• Winter 2011 and 2012: Bacteriology (Module 1 of undergraduate course: Medical Microbiology - Micro 301 001, Instructor)
  

Services:

• 2010: Lead guest editor for the Special Issue on Vaccine Informatics in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology.
• 2010-present: A member of editorial board for several journals, including: Frontier in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, Network Biology, Frontiers in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Journal of Medical Microbiology & Diagnosis, and Immunome Research (accepted on 02/02/2012).
  

He Group Members:

• He Group members and collaborators are listed in Here.

Publications:

• Selected publications are listed in Here.