Dr. Shaying Zhao is a professor of biochemistry and bioinformatics at the University of Georgia.  Her laboratory focuses on dog-human comparative genomics and oncology research.  Her group has successfully developed a novel dog-human comparison strategy for cancer driver-passenger discrimination, a central aim of cancer research.  Her lab is building essential experimental and computational pipelines to enhance the canine model in cancer immunotherapy research.  These include breed predication and validation, cancer somatic mutation discovery, MHC genotyping, tumor-specific neoantigen discovery, and T cell repertoire characterization for the dog.

Dr. Zhao received her PhD in biochemistry from University of Nebraska, and did a postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Aziz Sancar, a Nobel laureate.  Shen worked at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) from 1998-2005, where she led one of the best bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC)-end sequencing operations in the world, and made notable contributions to the sequencing of the human, mouse, rat, and cow genomes.

Dr.  Zhao has trained 17 PhD students or postdocs who have become professors at universities and scientists in industry.

Dr. Zhao is a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.  She served on the Expert Panel to evaluate the NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program in 2018.  She is currently serving on the Steering Committee of the NCI Integrated Canine Data Commons (ICDC) database.