Rate My Professor Xiao Dong

Xiao Dong is a McKnight Land-Grant Professor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He serves as Bioinformatics Core Director and is a member of the Masonic Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism, Life Course Center, Biology of Aging Medical Discovery Team, and Genetics Mechanisms of Cancer. Dong earned his PhD in bioinformatics from the Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013. Following this, he completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2021. That same year, he established the Xiao Dong laboratory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Dong's research centers on discovering causal mechanisms of human aging, with a focus on testing the mutation theory of aging by studying the accumulation of DNA mutations in normal somatic cells as a cause of age-related functional decline. He utilizes single-cell multi-omics technologies and machine learning algorithms to investigate somatic mutations and their functional impact in normal human tissues, cellular senescence identified through machine learning on transcriptome data, negative selection in noncancerous cells, and age-associated transcriptomic alterations across human tissues. His key publications include "Evidence for a limit to human lifespan" published in Nature in 2016, "Differences between germline and somatic mutation rates in humans and mice" in Nature Communications in 2017, "SomaMutDB 2.0: A comprehensive database for exploring somatic mutations and their functional impact in normal human tissues" in Nucleic Acids Research in 2026, "Divergent accumulation patterns of SNVs and INDELs reveal negative selection in noncancerous cells" in Innovation in 2025, and "Human Cell Aging Transcriptome Atlas (HCATA): a single-cell atlas of age-associated transcriptomic alterations across human tissues" in Communications Biology in 2025. Dong has produced 67 research outputs and received the 2026 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship Award.