Faculty Profile

Alex Tsoi

Alex Tsoi, PhD

  • Research Assistant Professor, Biostatistics

Alex Tsoi is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology, with joint appointments in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, and the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. Dr. Tsoi completed his PhD in biomedical science at the Medical University of South Carolina. His PhD work focused on developing data integration approaches to enhance prioritization and interpretation of high throughput experimental results. Dr. Tsoi then worked as a research fellow in the Center for Statistical Genetics from the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. He has been working on a variety of genetics and genomics projects for psoriasis. Dr. Tsoi has strong interests in investigating the pathology and genetic architecture of complex cutaneous disorders using systems biology approaches.

  • PhD Biomedical Science (Bioinformatics), Medical University of South Carolina
  • MS Biomedical Science (Bioinformatics), Medical University of South Carolina
  • BS Biology, minor in Mathematics, College of Charleston

Dr. Tsoi's research aims to develop analysis pipelines and computational approaches to provide biological inferences from genetics and genomics data. His work in genetic association studies revealed 40 novel psoriasis susceptibility regions, and highlighted different disease pathways. His recent work aims to model the risk of disease subtypes among psoriatic patients. He also led the analysis and developed computational pipeline to study psoriasis transcriptomes, and has been focusing on understanding the roles of skin-expressing lncRNAs.

Tsoi LC, Yang J, Liang Y, Sarkar MK, Xing X, Beamer MA, Aphale A, Raja K, Kozlow JH, Getsios S, Voorhees JJ, Kahlenberg M, Elder JT, Gudjonsson JE. Transcriptional determinants of individualized inflammatory responses at anatomically separate sites. Journal of Allergic and Clinical Immunology. 2017

Raja K, Patrick M, Elder JT, Tsoi LC. Machine learning workflow to enhance predictions of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) through drug-gene interactions: application to drugs for cutaneous diseases. Sci Rep. 2017 Jun 16;7(1):3690.

Tsoi LC, Stuart PE, Tian C, et al. Large scale meta-analysis characterizes genetic architecture for common psoriasis associated variants. Nat Comm. 2017 May 24;8:15382

Areas of Expertise: Biostatistics