Kelly Shaffer, PhD, Chongzhi Zang, PhD
Kelly Shaffer, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and Chongzhi Zang, PhD, Associate Professor of Genome Sciences, have joined UVA Cancer Center’s leadership in newly-created positions.
Dr. Shaffer has been appointed a co-lead of the Cancer Center’s Cancer Prevention and Population Health (CPH) research program, overseeing CPH’s new survivorship programmatic aim to optimize outcomes and achieve health equity among cancer patients and survivors through intervention development and implementation.
Dr. Zang is the Cancer Center’s inaugural Director of Computational Genomics. He will serve as a consultant and connector for investigators pursuing computational genomics research, foster increased collaboration with the School of Data Science, and work to improve utilization of the national Oncology Research Information Exchange Network (ORIEN), of which UVA is a member.
Cancer Center member faculty serve in one of four research programs, each representing an area of expertise important for understanding how cancer starts and progresses, and for development of interventions to detect, diagnose, treat and prevent it: Cancer Biology; Molecular Genetics and Epigenetics; Cancer Therapeutics; and CPH.
Dr. Shaffer joins Family Medicine Chair Li Li, MD, PhD, and Professor of Public Health Sciences Jamie Zoellner, PhD, RD, as a CPH program co-lead. Dr. Li oversees the program aim of advancing the science on cancer etiology, risk and progression, taking a cell-to-society perspective; and Dr. Zoellner the aim of preventing cancer and detecting cancer early through development and implementation of novel interventions.
A licensed clinical psychologist specializing in psycho-oncology, Dr. Shaffer sits on the faculty of the Center for Behavioral Health and Technology. In her research, she seeks to modernize and expand psychosocial care delivery to patients and their families through technology-based interventions. Her specific interests include increasing family caregivers’ access to psychosocial and behavioral interventions and female cancer survivors’ access to evidence-based sexual healthcare. She currently leads a factorial trial of internet-delivered intervention components to address cancer-related sexual dysfunction among breast cancer survivors that is funded by a 5-year, $3.1 million NCI R37 award. Previously, she led clinical trials evaluating the Sleep Healthy Using the Internet (SHUTi) intervention among family caregivers.
In announcing his appointment, Cancer Center Director Thomas P. Loughran Jr., MD, said that Dr. Zang “is ideally suited to the role as a highly accomplished, collaborative researcher and a dedicated mentor. While actively supporting young scientists and collaborating with researchers across Grounds, he looks forward to working with his Cancer Center colleagues to expand the impact of computational genomics in cancer research.”
Dr. Zang’s research focuses on developing computational methods for high-throughput genomics technologies, and on using data-science approaches to study epigenetics, chromatin and transcriptional regulation. He has developed several widely used tools for ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, and transcription factor analysis, and has made groundbreaking discoveries in gene regulatory mechanisms in various biological systems and in human cancers through innovative computational work. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal papers and has received multiple NIH grants. His honors include a UVA Research Excellence Award in 2020 and a Vivian Pinn Scholar Award this year.
Dr. Zang earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Peking University and his PhD in physics from the George Washington University. He completed postdoctoral training in computational biology at Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and joined the UVA School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 2016. He was promoted to associate professor in 2022 and awarded tenure this year. He also holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and Biomedical Engineering, and has served as a resident faculty member in the Department of Genome Sciences, formerly the Center for Public Health Genomics. He has been a Cancer Center member since 2017.
Filed Under: Faculty