Joha Park

I’m a computational biologist specializing in sequencing and in imaging data analysis. I build and develop computational solutions to streamline early clinical research and development. At Intellia, I’m focusing on the off-target discovery and validation for CRISPR-Cas gene editing systems for cell and gene therapy.

Before Intellia, I was a postdoc in the Chung lab. I had worked on hydrogel-based tissue engineering (review) and microscopy imaging data analysis. I developed eMAP which enables superresolution imaging on a cleared and expanded tissue-gel that maintains exceptional antigenicity. Typical datasets I analyzed were large-scale confocal/light-sheet microscopy images of those tissue-gel hybrids, which require dedicated machine learning techniques and efficient parallelization of computation.

Prior to that, I did my PhD in the Narry Kim lab to study RNA biology. I carried out diverse next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis to study various noncoding RNAs and mRNA poly(A) tails. Besides the standard NGS technologies such as bulk or single-cell RNA-seq, I have extensive experience in designing and analyzing custom sequencing libraries such as fCLIP-seq, TAIL-seq, and mTAIL-seq.

As a scientist, my long-term research interest lies in single-cell and computational genomics in the therapeutics context.