The Department of Biomedical Informatics would like to congratulate Dr. Kun Huang on his promotion to full professor; one of only three faculty in the department to do the full promotional process at Ohio State. Since joining the department in 2004, Dr. Huang has rapidly established himself as an expert in the field of translational bioinformatics and has gained the respect of his colleagues at Ohio State and internationally. He currently serves as the Associate Dean for Genome Informatics in the College of Medicine, Division Director of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and serves on numerous departmental and college committees. Internationally, Dr. Huang is a faculty advisor for OSU China Gateway, a university initiative for international collaborations in education, and was instrumental in the development of the OSU-Soochow University (Suzhou, China) Collaborative PhD Program in Biomedical Informatics – a first-of-its-kind program at Ohio State.
In addition to his extensive service to the Department, College and University, Dr. Huang has achieved great scientific success in the fields of computational biology, translational bioinformatics, bioimage informatics, and computer vision with specific foci in integrative genomics, microscopic image analysis, gene network analysis and next generation sequencing. Most recently he was awarded a U01 grant from the National Institutes of Health entitled, “Informatics links between histological features and genetics in cancer” (U01CA188547). This project will develop an informatics platform enabling the discovery of integrative biomarkers (including multiple phenotypic and genomic data sources) that can effectively stratify patients into subtypes, which may lead to improved treatment outcomes.
Dr. Huang has established numerous collaborations across the University, nationally, and internationally and has been integral in securing over $14 million in extramural funding for the university. This work has led to extensive publications, with over 150 publications in prestigious journals including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Cell, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Bioinformatics. Most recently, his paper entitled “Gene Co-Expression Analysis Predicts Genetic Variants Associated with Drug Responsiveness in Lung Cancer” received the Marco Ramoni Distinguished Paper Award at the 2016 AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Bioinformatics.
Lastly, Dr. Huang has demonstrated a commitment to education in his time at Ohio State and has mentored or served on a dissertation committee for over 20 doctoral, 25 masters and undergraduate, and 14 postdoctoral trainees. He received the Excellence in Teaching Award of College of Medicine in 2010. He was crucial in the development of multiple bioinformatics courses that are now core requirements in several undergraduate and graduate programs in the College of Medicine and is leading the development of several new biomedical data science-focused courses in the department.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Huang on this personal milestone and thanking him for his continued commitment to education, service, and research.