Dr Angli Xue

Dr Angli Xue is an NHMRC Investigator Fellow (EL1) and Senior Postdoctoral Scientist in the Powell Lab at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. His research focuses on how genetic variation regulates gene expression and chromatin in individual immune cell types. He led the TenK10K multiome project, which combined single-cell chromatin accessibility data from 3.5 million cells with whole-genome sequencing to map genetic effects on chromatin accessibility and dissect regulatory mechanisms in circulating immune cells. He is now leading the analysis of TenK10K Phase 2, which will profile more than 50 million cells from up to 10,000 individuals across healthy, cardiovascular, autoimmune, cancer and long COVID cohorts. The study aims to map how genetic variants act through gene regulatory networks under different cell states and immune stimulation, and how these networks are rewired in disease. Looking ahead, Angli aims to follow these effects over time and into more disease-relevant tissues, and to use them to build virtual immune cells that could guide more personalised treatment.

Angli completed his BSc at Zhejiang University, China, in 2015 and his PhD in statistical genetics at The University of Queensland in 2021 with Prof. Jian Yang. During his PhD, he used statistical and computational methods to dissect the genetic architecture of complex diseases, combining meta-analysis and multi-omics integration to identify associated loci and their regulatory mechanisms. He led what was at the time the largest genetic study of type 2 diabetes, highlighting three genes where a risk variant appears to act on disease through epigenetic regulation of gene expression. He also co-developed GSMR2, a software tool for testing causal relationships between modifiable risk factors and complex diseases. His first-authored papers include Clarivate Highly Cited Papers and have been highlighted by Nature Asia-Pacific. He received the DeLill Nasser Award for Professional Development in Genetics from the Genetics Society of America in recognition of his PhD work.