University of Missouri

Biography

Dong Xu is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the College of Engineering with appointments in Bond LSC and the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and did two years of postdoctoral work at the US National Cancer Institute. He was a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory until 2003. He then joined Mizzou where he served as department chair of Computer Science during 2007-2016 and director of Information Technology Program from 2017-2020.

Over the past 30+ years, he has conducted research in many areas of computational biology and bioinformatics, including single-cell data analysis, protein structure prediction and modeling, protein post-translational modifications, protein localization prediction, computational systems biology, biological information systems, and bioinformatics applications in human, microbes, and plants.

His research since 2012 has focused on the interface between bioinformatics and deep learning. He has published more than 500 papers with more than 28,000 citations and an H-index of 85 according to Google Scholar. He was elected to the rank of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2015 and became an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow in 2020.

As computer researcher with a strong background in molecular biology, Xu practices “bioinformatics.” He uses high-capacity computers to help other researchers analyze huge amounts of data, such as DNA sequences in human and plants. Xu’s lab has developed software programs that assist biological modeling; for example, one of their programs enables scientists to predict how proteins on the cellular level will change, or “fold,” when subjected to certain conditions.