Professor Wei Shi is the Professor of Bioinformatics Research in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University. He also serves as the Scientific Director of the Monash Genomics and Bioinformatics Platform. Prior to joining Monash University in 2024, he led a laboratory at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Professor Shi’s research specializes in developing advanced bioinformatics methods for analyzing next-generation sequencing data, particularly RNA-seq data. His lab has created some of the most widely used bioinformatics tools for RNA-seq quantification, including featureCounts (>20,000 citations; Google Scholar), Subread/Subjunc (>2,700 citations), and Rsubread (>2,000 citations). In addition to developing these tools, his lab applies bioinformatics algorithms to address various biological challenges. Their collaborative efforts with biology labs have led to significant contributions and publications in top-tier journals such as Nature (2x), Science (1x), Nature Immunology (13x), Immunity (4x), Nature Communications (4x), and PNAS (2x). Professor Shi is ranked 6th globally for RNA-seq for the past 5-years (ScholarGPS). His research has garnered over 80,000 total citations, and he has been recognized as a Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, a distinction placing him in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide, which he has received in 2018 and from 2020 to 2024.

My laboratory works on developing innovative bioinformatics methods for quantifying RNA-seq data including single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data, mapping long sequencing reads, and detecting structural variants and gene fusions in both short and long read data. Additionally, we actively collaborate with biology labs across diverse research areas, including immunology, cancer, and infectious diseases.