Lei Hou, Ph.D.


Lei Hou, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine, Biomedical Genetics Section

72 E Concord St. E244A, Boston, MA 02118
Email: leihou@bu.edu
Website: hougroup.xyz

Education

Postdoctoral training, Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and at Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT
Ph.D Bioinformatics, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
BE, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

Biography

Dr. Hou is a computational and systems biologist. He has over 15 years of research experience and has made significant contributions to the fields of regulatory genomics and disease genetics. In the past seven years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Hou has led several impactful projects, including study of human primordial germ cell differentiation with time series single-cell RNA-seq data, the study of genetics of m6A and H3K27ac signals and their implications in complex diseases, and the investigation of immune roles in bipolar disorder. he has collaborated with leading researchers from various institutions, including Harvard university, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, Mayo Clinic, Broad Institute, Mass General Hospital, Pfizer and Zhejiang University.

Dr. Hou has presented his research at several top-class national seminars and international conferences, including Broad Institute medical/population genetics and Cell Circuits/Epigenomics seminars, the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meeting on Systems Biology, and the CSHL Asia Meeting on Molecular Basis of Aging and Disease. Dr Hou’s co-first authored papers have also been published in high-impact journals, including Cell Metabolism, Nature Genetics, Cell Reports, and Aging Cell. He also serves as ad hoc reviewers for high-profiled journals and conferences including eLife, Aging Cell, Cell Reports, Frontiers in Genetics, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Current in Bioinformatics, Frontiers in Microbiology, Mathematical Biosciences, International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB).

Dr. Hou received his BE degree in the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University (thesis supervisors: Drs. Xuegong Zhang and Jing-Dong Jackie Han), his Ph.D of bioinformatics from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Supervisor: Dr. Jing-Dong Jackie Han), his postdoc training at Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (with Dr. Jing-Dong Jackie Han), and at Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT (with Dr. Manolis Kellis).

Research Interests

He is interested in understanding the complexity of biological systems through computational and systems biology approaches. Specifically: (1) regulatory genomics: understand the dynamics of regulatory network/epigenomic regulation during differentiation and aging, or upon environmental stimuli and design perturbations; (2) disease genetics: characterize function of disease-associated genetic variants in cell type/tissue specific manner by integration of functional genomic and QTL data; and (3) precision medicine: combine the two above to prioritize biomarkers, subtype patients and identify therapeutic targets for diseases towards precision medicine.

Selected Publications

  1. Lei Hou#, Xushen Xiong#, Yongjin Park, Carles Boix, Benjamin James, Na Sun, Liang He, Aman Patel, Zhizhuo Zhang, Benoit Molinie, Nicholas Van Wittenberghe, Scott Steelman, Chad Nusbaum, François Aguet, Kristin G. Ardlie, Manolis Kellis. Multi-tissue epigenomic variation across 387 GTEx samples helps interpret brain, heart, muscle, and lung disease genetics. Accepted, Nature Genetics, 2023.
  2. Xushen Xiong#, Lei Hou,# Yongjin P. Park, Benoit Molinie, GTEx Consortium, Richard I. Gregory & Manolis Kellis, Genetic drivers of m6A methylation in human brain, heart, muscle, and lung. Nature Genetics, 53, 1156–1165, 2021.
  3. Di Chen#, Na Sun#, Lei Hou#, Rachel Kim, Jared Faith, Marianna Aslanyan, Yu Tao, Yi Zheng, Jianping Fu, Wanlu Liu, Manolis Kellis, Amander Clark. Human Primordial Germ Cells Are Specified from Lineage-Primed Progenitors. Cell Reports 29 (13), 4568-4582. E5, 2019
  4. Dan Wang#, Lei Hou#, Shuhei Nakamura, Ming Su, Fang Li, Weiyang Chen, Yizhen Yan, Christopher D Green, Di Chen, Hong Zhang, Adam Antebi, Jing‐Dong J Han. LIN-28 balances longevity and germline stem cell number in Caenorhabditis elegans through let-7/AKT/DAF-16 axis. Aging Cell, 2017.
  5. Lei Hou#, Dan Wang#, Di Chen, Yi Liu, Yue Zhang, Hao Cheng, Chi Xu, Na Sun, Joseph McDermott, William B Mair, Jing-Dong J Han. A Systems Approach to Reverse Engineer Lifespan Extension by Dietary Restriction. Cell Metabolism, March 8, 2016
  6. Lei Hou, Jialiang Huang, Christopher D Green, Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, Wei Zhang, Xiaoming Yu, Wenxuan Gong, Bing Zhou, Jing-Dong J Han. Systems Biology in Aging: Linking the Old and the Young. Current Genomics, Nov, 2012.

# co-first author