Jingjing Zhai is a Research Associate working jointly with the Buckler and Pennell labs. Her research focuses on applying machine learning and deep learning to plant genomics, particularly sequence-to-function modeling, functional annotation of genetic variants, and integrated analysis of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data. Currently, she is working on developing plant-specific DNA language models (PlantCAD, Zhai et al., PNAS 2025) and PlantCAD2, is a long-context model pre-trained on 65 angiosperm genomes that captures evolutionary conservation and enables accurate genome annotation across diverse species.
