About

Kai Wang, Ph.D., is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics. His research laboratory focuses on developing novel genomics and bioinformatics methods to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of rare diseases, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the implementation of genomic medicine on a large scale. His work involves creating analytical pipelines for whole genome and exome sequencing data, developing genomic assays for long-read sequencing technologies, and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to correlate genotypes with phenotypes. Dr. Wang's research aims to enhance the interpretation of sequencing data, identify causal genetic variants, and better understand phenotypic heterogeneity in inherited diseases. His contributions include the development of computational tools and methods that advance genomic analysis and precision medicine.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Computer Science
• Chemistry
• Materials science
• Endocrinology
• Biology
• Machine Learning
• Biochemistry
• Optoelectronics
• Condensed matter physics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Pathology
• Physics
• Optics
• Nanotechnology
• Biological system
• Nuclear physics
• Cell biology
• Quantum mechanics
• Ophthalmology
• Molecular biology
• Cardiology
• Genetics

Selected publications

• High-field critical current density enhancement in GdBCO coated conductors by cooperative defects

  Superconductor Science and Technology · 2023 · 12 citations

  • Materials science
  • Condensed matter physics
  • Optoelectronics

  Abstract Irradiation can precisely control defects in, and improve the superconducting properties of, REBa 2 Cu 3 O 7− δ (REBCO, RE: rare earth) coated conductors (CCs). Here we report an effective approach for enhancing the in-field performance of GdBCO CCs. The critical current density ( J c ) of GdBCO films was significantly improved through cooperative defects created by co-irradiation with O ions and protons, especially at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. Surprisingly, the in-field J c of commercial CCs can be nearly doubled. The cooperative irradiation-induced defects are uniformly distributed throughout the GdBCO layer, which promotes the overall performance of the CC. Moreover, the dimensions of these irradiation-induced defects closely match the coherence length of REBCO. This simple and efficient method is a practical post-production solution to improve the in-field performance of commercial REBCO CCs.

  PublisherDOI

• Elevated blood pressure accelerates white matter brain aging among late middle-aged women: a Mendelian Randomization study in the UK Biobank

  Journal of Hypertension · 2023 · 13 citations

  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Demography

  BACKGROUND: Elevated blood pressure (BP) is a modifiable risk factor associated with cognitive impairment and cerebrovascular diseases. However, the causal effect of BP on white matter brain aging remains unclear. METHODS: In this study, we focused on N = 228 473 individuals of European ancestry who had genotype data and clinical BP measurements available (103 929 men and 124 544 women, mean age = 56.49, including 16 901 participants with neuroimaging data available) collected from UK Biobank (UKB). We first established a machine learning model to compute the outcome variable brain age gap (BAG) based on white matter microstructure integrity measured by fractional anisotropy derived from diffusion tensor imaging data. We then performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis to estimate the causal effect of BP on white matter BAG in the whole population and subgroups stratified by sex and age brackets using two nonoverlapping data sets. RESULTS: The hypertension group is on average 0.31 years (95% CI = 0.13-0.49; P < 0.0001) older in white matter brain age than the nonhypertension group. Women are on average 0.81 years (95% CI = 0.68-0.95; P < 0.0001) younger in white matter brain age than men. The Mendelian randomization analyses showed an overall significant positive causal effect of DBP on white matter BAG (0.37 years/10 mmHg, 95% CI 0.034-0.71, P = 0.0311). In stratified analysis, the causal effect was found most prominent among women aged 50-59 and aged 60-69. CONCLUSION: High BP can accelerate white matter brain aging among late middle-aged women, providing insights on planning effective control of BP for women in this age group.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Huangqi-Honghua Combination Prevents Cerebral Infarction with Qi Deficiency and Blood Stasis Syndrome in Rats by the Autophagy Pathway

  Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine · 2022 · 7 citations

  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Endocrinology

  BACKGROUND: Cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury (CI/RI) contributes to the process of autophagy. Huangqi-Honghua combination (HQ-HH) is a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) combination that has been widely used in the treatment of cerebrovascular diseases in China. The role of autophagy in HQ-HH-mediated treatment of CI/RI is unclear. METHODS: Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were used to establish the middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) with QDBS syndrome model and evaluate the function of HQ-HH in protecting against CI/RI. RESULTS: HQ-HH significantly improved the neuronal pathology and reduced infarct volume, neurological deficits, and whole blood viscosity in rats with CI/RI. Western blot results showed that the expression of autophagy marker proteins LC3II/LC3I and Beclin1 in the HQ-HH group was significantly lower than that in the model group, while the expression of p62 was significantly higher in the HQ-HH group as compared with the model group. There were no significant differences in PI3K, Akt, and mTOR levels between the HQ-HH group and the model group; however, p-PI3K, p-Akt, and p-mTOR were significantly upregulated. In addition, HQ-HH also changed the composition and function of intestinal flora in MCAO + QDBS model rats. CONCLUSION: HQ-HH protects from CI/RI, and its underlying mechanism may involve the activation of the PI3K-Akt-mTOR signaling pathway, relating to the changes in the composition of intestinal flora.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multiple early factors anticipate post-acute COVID-19 sequelae

  Cell · 2022 · 1169 citations

  • Biology
  • Immunology
  • Virology

  T cells exhibited unique dynamics during recovery from COVID-19. Analysis of symptom-associated immunological signatures revealed coordinated immunity polarization into four endotypes, exhibiting divergent acute severity and PASC. We find that immunological associations between PASC factors diminish over time, leading to distinct convalescent immune states. Detectability of most PASC factors at COVID-19 diagnosis emphasizes the importance of early disease measurements for understanding emergent chronic conditions and suggests PASC treatment strategies.

  DOI

• Deep-learning models for the detection and incidence prediction of chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes from retinal fundus images

  Nature Biomedical Engineering · 2021 · 307 citations

  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Ophthalmology
  DOI

• Spin-Valve Effect in Fe₃GeTe₂/MoS₂/Fe₃GeTe₂ van der Waals Heterostructures

  ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · 2020 · 161 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Materials science
  • Condensed matter physics
  • Optoelectronics

  sandwiched by conventional ferromagnetic electrodes. The MR decreasing monotonically with increasing temperature follows the Bloch's law. As the bias current decreases exponentially, the MR increases linearly up to a maximum value of 4.1%. Our results reveal the potential opportunities of vdW heterostructures for developing novel spintronic devices.

  DOI

• Suppressing Uncertainties for Large-Scale Facial Expression Recognition

  2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · 2020 · 679 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Annotating a qualitative large-scale facial expression dataset is extremely difficult due to the uncertainties caused by ambiguous facial expressions, low-quality facial images, and the subjectiveness of annotators. These uncertainties suspend the progress of large-scale Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in data-driven deep learning era. To address this problelm, this paper proposes to suppress the uncertainties by a simple yet efficient Self-Cure Network (SCN). Specifically, SCN suppresses the uncertainty from two different aspects: 1) a self-attention mechanism over FER dataset to weight each sample in training with a ranking regularization, and 2) a careful relabeling mechanism to modify the labels of these samples in the lowest-ranked group. Experiments on synthetic FER datasets and our collected WebEmotion dataset validate the effectiveness of our method. Results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our SCN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with \textbf{88.14}\% on RAF-DB, \textbf{60.23}\% on AffectNet, and \textbf{89.35}\% on FERPlus.

  DOI

• Exposure to Static Magnetic and Electric Fields Treats Type 2 Diabetes

  Cell Metabolism · 2020 · 81 citations

  • Medicine
  • Chemistry
  • Cell biology
  DOI

• Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

  Communications Biology · 2020 · 219 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Biomedical engineering
  • Biological system

  Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data.

  DOI

Recent grants

• Community Engagement Core

  NIH · $25.0M · 2006–2030

• NIH Grant R21CA122426

  NIH · $298k · 2011

• NIH Grant R01CA111603

  NIH · $1.6M · 2011

• NIH Grant R01MH108728

  NIH · $1.2M · 2019

• NIH Grant R01HG006465

  NIH · $1.8M · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Gang Chen

  Fudan University

  5245 shared

• Han Wu

  Anhui Science and Technology University

  2156 shared

• Wei Gong

  Sichuan Agricultural University

  1960 shared

• Yuan Liu

  Kunming University of Science and Technology

  1140 shared

• Wei Gong

  Wuhan Botanical Garden

  1120 shared

• Hao Zheng

  Sun Yat-sen University

  924 shared

• Shan Wei

  Ningbo University

  912 shared

• Yanghua Tian

  Anhui Medical University

  824 shared

Education

• B.S., Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

  Peking University

  2000

• M.S., Tumor Biology

  Mayo Clinic

  2002

• Ph.D., Microbiology & Computational Biology

  University of Washington

  2005

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• M. Celeste Simonh-185