Instructor
August joined the lab in 2017 as a postdoctoral fellow after a two-year postdoctoral training at Matthew Warman’s lab in Boston Children’s Hospital. He received his PhD in Bioinformatics at Peking University in China. His previous work focused on identifying somatic mutations from next-generation sequencing data and understanding the characteristics of somatic mutations in disease and healthy human genomes. During his PhD studies, he developed a computational algorithm named MosaicHunter, which is able to identify somatic mutations from whole-genome or whole-exome sequencing data without the requirement of matched control samples. Then he successfully applied MosaicHunter to discover the pathogenic role of somatic mutations in several non-cancer human diseases, including autism and arteriovenous malformation. His primary research interest is to investigate whether and how genomic factors shape the distribution of somatic mutations in neuron and other cell types by combining bulk and single-cell genomic sequencing techniques.