Dr. Dadi Gao is a Research Fellow in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Under the mentorship of Drs. Michael Talkowski and Manolis Kellis, Dr. Gao will examine the functional impact of mobile element insertions (MEIs) in neurological disorders using deep learning techniques. Specifically, he will characterize functional MEIs in genotype-tissue expression in healthy individuals, build a comprehensive map of MEIs to determine tissue-specific and brain-specific effects; and impute transcriptional changes on various neurological disorders where whole-genome sequencing data will be generated. To do this, he will apply statistical and deep learning models to large samples of sequencing data from post-mortem tissue of healthy individuals, as well as patients with neurological disorders. Dr. Gao’s work will improve our understanding of the role of MEIs in neuronal development and neurological disorders. Dr. Gao received his Bachelor of Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and his master’s and PhD from the University of Sydney.