While putting the finishing touches on a doctoral degree, University of Florida student Xinsong Du has secured his immediate future as a postdoctoral research fellow. The position starts in August in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
At UF, Du has been an Informatics Institute Fellow for two years while pursuing a doctorate in the department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI). He defended his dissertation in late May.
In an email announcing the postdoctoral fellowship, Du expressed his gratitude to HOBI and particularly to his mentor Dominick Lemas, Ph.D.:
“I would like to express my deep appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Lemas, for his invaluable help and guidance throughout my training. Dr. Lemas has been incredibly patient in his mentorship, not only teaching me research skills but also essential abilities in teaching and communication. Despite being from China, I have always felt welcomed and included in the lab, and I consider the team my second family.”
Du’s research used data from Lemas’ NIH-funded study on breastfeeding and human milk’s benefits. He investigated specialized methods to process the data to enhance the computational reproducibility of clinical metabolomics research, which studies small molecules known as metabolites and their impact on health.
Previous to the Ph.D. program, Du was a research assistant in UF’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where he also earned a master’s degree. His bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering comes from Shandong University in Jinan, China.
Watch Xinsong Du in this video from the Informatics Institute discussing his research on “Computational Reproducibility in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-Based Clinical Metabolomics Data Processing.”