News

2023-11: Welcome Farhan Khodaee, a graduate student of MIT EECS, joining our lab as a visiting graduate student.

2023-10: We conquered Monadnock!! A wonderful lab hiking at the Monadnock mountain during the New England foliage season. Check out the Lab Fun page for pictures. For those who don't know, Monadnock is also the conference room name at Broad Institute where we have weekly seminars. 

2023-09: Our lab is awarded another grant from the Common Fund of NIH Office of the Director. More exciting science to come soon!

2023-08: We are pleased to further support the underrepresented scientists in computational biology for their training and career development. Thanks to the NIH support!

2023-06: Our team has grown a lot recently! Welcome Dr. Qingji Lyu, our first postdoc scholar, Parmida Davarmanesh, our first graduate student from MIT EECS, and Fifi Pan, an undergraduate student from USC! Welcome to the Xia lab! More excitingly, we started weekly group meetings!!

2023-03: Excited to be among the first cohort of the GREGoR Research Grant awardees. We thank the GREGoR Consortium for supporting our work. Check out the news from the GREGoR Consortium.

2023-01: Our manuscript on predicting cell type-specific genome organization and high-throughput in silico genetic screen with C.Origami, is now online at Nature Biotechnology. Congrats to the team!

2022-10: The Xia lab is excited and grateful to receive the 2022 NIH Director's Early Independence Award (DP5)! More exciting science to come!

    NIH News Release: NIH to award over $200 million to support potentially transformative biomedical research projects

    Harvard Gazette: Nine Harvard scientists win NIH grants

    Harvard Crimson: Harvard Researchers Receive NIH Funding

2022-09: Our manuscript on predicting cell type-specific genome organization through a novel multi-modal deep neural network, C.Origami, is accepted at Nature Biotechnology. C.Origami predicts cell type-specific genome organization and enables high-throughput in silico genetic screen for biological discoveries. 

2022-09: We are grateful to receive Arima Genomics 2022 Disease Research Grant to support our research into genome organization. 

2022-06: Bo Xia is selected as a Junoir Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Read more about the current Fellows at the Society of Fellows. 

2022-03: Bo Xia won the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. The Weintraub Award is considered as one of the highest awards recognizing outstanding achievement in graduate studies in biological sciences around the world. Read the press coverage. 

2021-09: Our work, 'genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes', is reported by multiple major media, with some representative reports below:

New York Times, How Humans Lost Their Tails, by Carl Zimmer

Science, ‘Jumping gene’ may have erased tails in humans and other apes, by Gretchen Vogel

New Scientist, How our ape ancestors suddenly lost their tails 25 million years ago, by Michael Le Page

The Scientist, Alu Leap May Explain Why Apes Don’t Have Tails, by Annie Melchor

Smithsonian Magazine, Why Humans Don’t Have Tails, by Corryn Wetzel

BBC News, 基因揭秘 人类如何“甩掉”了尾巴

Mashable, How did humans lose their tails? Scientists discover what happened, by Mark Kaufman

2020-06: Bo Xia won the highly prestigious Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation. The Regeneron Prize awards one graduate student and one postdoctoral fellow across the leading universities in the U.S. each year to recognize and honor excellence in biomedical science. Read the press coverage. 

2020-01: Our work, 'transcriptional scanning model for modulating genome evolution‘, is reported by multiple media:

EurekaAlert!, ScienceDaily, Yahoo! News, Phys.org, News Medical Life Sciences,