Dr. Cong's group is developing novel technology for genome editing and single-cell genomics, leveraging scalable methods inspired by data science and machine learning and artificial intelligence.
His group has a focus on using these gene-editing tools to study immunological and neurological diseases. His work has led to one of the first FDA-approved clinical trials using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing for in vivo gene therapy. More recently, his group invented tools for cleavage-free large gene insertion via mining microbial recombination protein (Wang et al. 2022), and developed single-cell perturbating - tracking approach for studying cancer immunology and neuro-immunology (Hughes et al. 2022). We have also strong interest in using deep learning for predicting and designing gene-editing system and protein function (Hughes et al. 2022 and Yuan et al. 2023). Dr. Cong is a recipient of the NIH/NHGRI Genomic Innovator Award, a Baxter Foundation Faculty Scholar, and has been selected by Clarivate Web of Science as a Highly Cited Researcher.
