Team

Xinxia is a tenured Associate Professor of Infectious diseases in the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences, and a member of NC State Bioinformatics Research Center. He received his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and worked as a Bioinformatics Manager at Seattle BioMed (now Center for Global Infectious Disease Research). In 2008 he joined the University of Washington as a Computational Research Scientist. He was promoted to a Research Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Microbiology in 2012. He joined NC State in July 2016 as Dean’s Faculty Excellence cluster hire, in the field of “Translational Genomics of Infectious Diseases”.

Tammy Tollison, MS, Lab Manager

Tammy received a MS in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (2011) from Emory University and a BS in Genetics (2007) from Clemson University. Prior to joining the Peng Lab, she worked as an educator for 8 years with most of this time spent as a member of the Natural Sciences department at Wake Tech Community College. Tammy joined the Peng Lab near the end of 2019 and her current role involves work with a microbiome project focused on vaginal communities as well as use of her experience with 5’RACE to be applied to other projects in the lab.

Kay received a MS in Microbiology (2016) and a BS in Zoology (2014) from Western Illinois University with minors in Mathematics and Chemistry. At North Carolina State University she entered as part of the PhD Genetics program in 2018 with interests in Neurobiology and Immunology. She joined Peng Lab in the Spring of 2019 to work with research being conducted on the functional impact of genetic variations in complex immune gene loci such as Fc Receptors.

Kristen John, Genetics

I graduated with a B.S. in Cell & Molecular Biology from Liberty University in 2019 and joined the Peng Lab in the spring of 2020. My general research interests are in understanding the biological mechanisms behind human disease.

I received my B.S. in Biological Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2020, and now I am pursuing a PhD in Bioinformatics. My research interests lie in identifying and understanding genetic predispositions that cause human diseases.

Sangmi Jeong, Bioinformatics

I received a MA in Statistics in 2021 from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. I am pursuing a PhD in Bioinformatics at North Carolina State University. I chose the Peng Lab because I’m interested in their microbiome research. I am learning how deep sequencing analysis help understanding the relationship between host immune responses and microbiome, and what computational methods can be applied when analyzing the data. I am looking forward to gaining knowledge and experience in the Peng Lab.