Dr Xiaohua Douglas Zhang is an associate director at Merck Research Laboratories. He has worked on data analysis for genome-wide RNAi research and microarrays in drug discovery and development for various diseases for many years. He has continuously developed novel analytic methods and experimental designs for quality control and hit selection in genome-scale RNAi research. He and his colleagues have published many papers in various peer-reviewed journals, including Cell Host and Microbe, Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, Genetic Epidemiology, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacogenomics, Genomics and the Journal of Biomolecular Screening, among many others.

• Part I. RNAi HTS and Data Analysis: 1. Introduction to genome-scale RNAi research; 2. Experimental designs; 3. Data display and normalization; 4. Quality control in genome-scale RNAi screens; 5. Hit selection in genome-scale RNAi screens without replicates; 6. Hit selection in genome-scale RNAi screens with replicates; Part II. Methodological Development for Analyzing RNAi HTS Screens: 7. Statistical methods for group comparison; 8. Statistical methods for assessing the size of siRNA effects.