Visiting Scientist

Early Life Aetiology and Mechanisms of Diabetes and Related Metabolic Disorders

Current work and interests

Yajie Zhao’s research interest is to explore the genetic architecture of growth and development traits using high-throughput sequencing data, which includes implementing and/or developing methods which better characterize and explore the allelic spectrum of growth and development traits, identifying somatic and germline ‘genetic phenotypes’ such as clonal mosaicism and telomere length and exploring their roles in relevant traits.

Background and experience

Yajie Zhao was a PhD student with the Unit, supervised by Dr John R.B. Perry and Dr Hana Lango Allen. Prior to joining the unit, Yajie graduated from University of Warwick with a first class honor degree where he studied Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics (MORSE) and obtained his master’s degree from the University of Oxford where he studied mathematical sciences. His master dissertation focused on using mathematical and statistical models to predict the trend of the epidemic disease, supervised by Professor Christl Donnelly.

Outside of his studies, he is also a part-time science news reporter and the social media manager of one of the most influential science news media in China.