Dr. Eunji Ha is the first PhD graduate of my lab. Her CV is available at HERE.

It was a major accomplishment to recruit her as a PhD student to my nascent research lab. Her first research project was to understand how the rheumatoid arthritis (RA)-risk variants shape disease-specific transcriptomic signatures in CD4+ cells, by using CD4+ cell-derived multi-omics data in a Korean case-control cohort. She provided the landscapes of transcriptomic and methylomic features in RA CD4+ T cells, with catalogues of QTLs for expression and methylation. Her integrative approaches using individual-level genetic, epigenetic, and transcriptomic data with genome-wide RA association statistics dissected the regulatory sources for differentially expressed genes in RA CD4+ T cells. More importantly, she found that RA-risk variant-driven methylation changes resulted in the differential expression of a large number of genes in RA CD4+ T cells. Her work was accepted for publication in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (IF=27.973) and published in January 2021 (title: Genetic variants shape rheumatoid arthritis-specific transcriptomic features in CD4+ T cells through differential DNA methylation, explaining a substantial proportion of heritability.; https://ard.bmj.com/content/80/7/876).

In another key project, Eunji identified 11 novel genetic loci that confer risk of RA in 311,292 individuals of Korean, Japanese, and European populations. Her subsequent computational genetic analyses revealed lots of interesting insights from the genome-wide association statistics, especially about the importance of CD4+ T-cell biology in RA pathogenesis, disease-relevant effector genes, and targets of potentially repurposable drugs approved for other indications. Her results were published in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases in 2021 (title: Large-scale meta-analysis across East Asian and European populations updated genetic architecture and variant-driven biology of rheumatoid arthritis, identifying 11 novel susceptibility loci.; https://ard.bmj.com/content/80/5/558). Her genetics paper was featured in the Research Highlight of Nature Reviews Rheumatology (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41584-021-00580-8), written by the Chief Editor of the journal.

Her research stories will continue with my lab. Another first-author paper on the genetic risk score for lupus is under revision. She is also actively working on the single-cell transcriptomic data to explore the immunodynamics in patients with RA upon treatment with a biologics. 

She will join Susztak Lab at UPenn in April as a postdoc fellow. Good luck with her new start!