Research and Teaching Interests

Dr. Cai's research focuses on the development and application of bioinformatic, statistical and computational methods for analyzing genomic and biomedical data to address public health issues, including disease etiology, environmental toxicology and drug discovery problems. Specifically, his current research aims at (1) developing efficient methods for sequencing data analysis, such as differential expression analysis, batch effect correction and single-cell RNA-seq data analysis, (2) understanding the etiology of disease by integrating multi-dimensional genomics data, such DNA methylation and RNA expression, (3) identifying genomic markers and predicting disease outcomes using machine learning methods and (4) developing computational toxicology methods to understand and predict health effects caused by environmental pollutants, natural compounds and pharmaceuticals.