News

2024

2024-02: Our work, 'On the genetic basis of tail loss evolution in humans and apes‘, is online in Nature and featured an impressive cover. Also, the work comes with a thoughtful Nature News & Views: A mobile DNA sequence could explain tail loss in humans and apes, many public media coverages such as CNN, Reuters, Scientific American, Nature etc. Check out some representatives below

2024-02: We are proud to learn that Bingham Zheng and Fifi Gao - the first two applicants from our lab - both got accepted to some top Ph.D. programs across the country! Congratulations to both of them!!


2024-02: Two papers got accepted in principle - a good start to the new year! Stay tuned! 

2023

2023-12: Welcome Dr. Xinyu Ling, a Jane Coffin Childs Fund Fellow, joining our lab as a postdoc fellow. Moreover, our lab finished the wonderful year with a fun lab meeting filled with interesting science and games&gifts, and a lab dinner of celebration and appreciation! Check out more from the Lab Fun page. Looking forward to more good news to come in 2024!


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


2023-11: Our manuscript on tail-loss genetics in humans and apes is accepted in Nature. Stay tuned!


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

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!

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 screening 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

Before 2022

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

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