Peipei Ping, PhD

About

Peipei Ping, Ph.D., is a Professor of Physiology, Medicine/Cardiology, and Bioinformatics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Zhejiang University, China in 1985. Mentored by Dr. Paul C. Johnson, Dr. Ping received her Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology at University of Arizona in 1990. Subsequently, she completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. James E. Faber’s Vascular Biology laboratory at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a second postdoctoral training with Dr. H. Kirk Hammond at UCSD in Molecular Cardiology and translational research. Under the mentorship of Dr. H. Kirk Hammond, she made remarkable contributions in elucidating the expression and signaling of diverse G protein receptor kinases and beta-adrenergic receptors in the normal and injured heart, which resulted publications in high-impact journals as J Clin Invest (1995) and Nature Medicine (1996). In 1996, Dr. Ping accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Department of physiology/Division of Cardiology at University of Louisville where she worked closely with Dr. Roberto Bolli, and pioneered a functional proteomics approach to identify the protein signaling modalities in ischemic/reperfusion injuries and cardioprotection. In 1998, her research group was the first to identify the subproteomes containing PKCε that are responsible for signaling mediation of cardioprotection. Dr. Ping was promoted as Associate Professor in 2000.

In 2002, Dr. Ping was recruited to UCLA as a Full Professor of Physiology, Medicine/Cardiology, and Bioinformatics in the David Geffen School of Medicine. Since joining UCLA, she led an investigator team and successfully competed for several major NIH awards. During this time, Dr. Ping served as the director of the NHLBI Program Project on Myocardial Ischemia Injury and Protection (2004-2011), International Consortium of Proteome Biology in Cardiovascular Medicine (2010-current), NHLBI Proteomics Center at UCLA (2010-2015), NIH BD2K Center of Excellence for Biomedical Computing at UCLA (2014-2019), and NIH BD2K Centers-Coordination Center (2015-2019). As of April 2024, Dr. Ping and Dr. Wei Wang are the co-Leads and MPIs of the NIH Integration and Coordination Center Sustainability Core for the NIH Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE), supporting 15+ NIH Common Fund Programs engaged with CFDE.

Over the past 2 decades, Dr. Ping has made significant contributions to cardiovascular research, proteomics phenotyping, and Big Data science. She characterized the cardioprotective role of PKCε as well as other underlying mechanisms in cardiac injury and protection; pioneered the conceptualization and development of functional proteomics approaches to characterize signaling pathways in the heart; advanced proteomics/metabolomics technologies, including model systems, quantitative analyses, PTM studies, protein spatial/temporal dynamics, and omics data-driven biomarker discovery. Recently, she has become a critical player in the nation-wide initiative of Big Data Science and tirelessly promotes Big Data science in clinical translation for precision medicine. To date, Dr. Ping has published 200+ original articles or reviews in peer-reviews journals, including New Eng J Med, J Clin Invest, and Circulation.

Dr. Ping is strongly committed to supporting and mentoring students. As a faculty member with joint appointments in Physiology, Medicine/Cardiology, and Bioinformatics, she has been instrumental in creating a wide spectrum of educational programs, including high school internship programs, diversity-focused programs, graduate degree programs and physician scientist training programs. Over the past 20 years, in addition to large classroom-based lecturing in both the UCLA School of Medicine and School of Engineering, Dr. Ping has mentored 90+ postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Each is playing an important role in many aspects of our society today; 16 have achieved independent positions in academia and many have successful careers in both public and private sectors. Recently, she worked with Dr. Karol Watson to create a physician scientist training program in data science, and under her leadership, the NIH BD2K Center of Excellence at UCLA has collaborated with the CTSA Program at UCLA to engage physician investigators in data analytical tool development. She also serves as core faculty in training graduate students in the Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics programs at UCLA. Overall, Dr. Ping is committed to cross-disciplinary training that integrates computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, statistics, and medical informatics in order to equip future investigators with skills required for the digital era of biomedicine.

Dr. Ping currently serves as Co-Lead Investigator of the NIH Bridge2AI Training, Recruitment, and Mentoring (TRM) Working Group, where she helps spearhead national efforts to educate a robust, data-capable workforce equipped to advance ethical and effective applications of AI in biomedicine. Based at UCLA, the TRM-WG, under her joint leadership Dr. Karol Watson, designs and implements AI readiness training, mentorship frameworks, and inclusive scholar engagement strategies across Bridge2AI's interdisciplinary Grand Challenges. Dr. Ping's leadership has been central in shaping collaborative infrastructure and educational initiatives that support the next generation of biomedical AI researchers.

Dr. Ping has served and is currently serving on multiple Editorial Boards and Publications Committees, including Circulation (2001-current; AE: 2016-present), Circulation Research (1999-2004), AJP (1999-2013; Consulting Editor: 2001-2005; AE: 2004-2005), JMCC (2000-current), Journal of Proteome Research (Editorial Scientific Advisory Board: 2007-2009), Proteomics (2007-2009), Clinical Proteomics (2009-2012), and HUPO Publications Committee (Chair: 2005-2010). Furthermore, Dr. Ping dedicatedly involves in many professional organizations and NIH grant study sections; notably, she is the president-elect of International Society of Heart Research (ISHR, 2015-2018), the Founding Council Member of Human Proteome Organization (HUPO, 2001), and a regular member for NIH grant review study section of CCHF (Cardiac Contractility, Hypertrophy, and Failure, 2011-current), NHLBI Intramural Program Review Committee (2015, 2016), NIGMS PPG SEP (Member, 2011-2012), and NIDDK SEP on Collaborative Interdisciplinary Team Science (Chairperson, 2009, panel member, 2012, 2015).

Research Interests

Our research program develops integrative omics and data science approaches to unravel the mechanisms underlying cardiovascular phenotypes. This involves analytical and computational methods investigating the relationship between genes, proteins, drug-targets, and their dynamics underlying the complex physiology of normal and diseased systems. We integrate these insights with the vast clinical and experimental knowledge uncovered by mining text datasets, omics datasets, time-series datasets, and imaging datasets. Since 1996, the program has published more than 200+ peer-reviewed papers spanning cardiovascular medicine, medical informatics, and omics phenotyping using approaches of deep-learning and large language models. We leverage advanced data science biomedical techniques to clarify how protein expression, timing govern organelle function and ultimately, cardiovascular phenotypes. We have created computational workflows to automate the characterization of multiple proteins at proteome-scale to capture an expanded range of protein features, quantifying proteome-wide post-translational modifications (including oxidative-stress marks), mapping sub-cellular localizations, and tracking rapid temporal shifts to reveal previously unseen disease pipelines that convert massive collections of clinical case reports into actionable knowledge.

Our primary research interest is to apply data science technologies to advance biomedicine and healthcare, including the creation of software tools and computational platforms to integrate multi-omics data, text-mine electronic health records, promote data annotations, and translate big data into knowledge. Recently, our projects are dedicated to explaining cardiac death with ECG-based multi-modal knowledge distillation using LLM-LM interpretation and an omics-based AI approach to elucidate molecular insights underlying pathological phenotypes in atherosclerosis.

One major effort of our team has been successfully creating best practices for trustworthy AI and computational frameworks to support biomedical dataset AI readiness, including information retrieval from knowledgebases, text mining workflows, omics data integration platforms, and trustworthy LLMs.

Another research focus is developing a hierarchical graph neural network framework to study the problem of personalized classification of subclinical atherosclerosis. We leverage two clinical aspects of a patient: clinical features (e.g., demographics, comorbidities) and molecular data (e.g., filtered omics features mapped onto patient-specific PPI subgraphs). Our aim is to enhance precision cardiovascular diagnostics and to identify disease subtypes by integrating molecular interaction signatures of each patient with clinical features that reflect cohort-level behaviors in our predictive model. Recent Projects include:

AI approach to elucidate molecular insights in atherosclerosis
Building a trustworthy biomedical AI ecosystem
Deep learning for PTM studies
ECG-based multimodal knowledge distillation by LLM-LM Interpretation
Elucidating the role of organellar pathways in disease
Missing value imputation: rendering dataset AI-ready
Representation of and integration of multimodal molecular embeddings

Cardiovascular Proteomics and Metabolomics. We are particularly interested (have invested great efforts) in understanding the mechanisms of heart diseases and injuries. By combining multi-scale molecular parameters, we successfully interrogated the large-scale alterations of protein expression and dynamics during disease development to infer novel disease proteins. (Once as) As a host to the NIH NHLBI Proteomics Center at UCLA, we developed advanced mass spectrometry techniques to understand the organization and functions of cardiac proteomes in healthy and diseased hearts. A major emphasis is to expand the number of proteome parameters one can observe on a large scale, including quantification of proteome-wide post-translational modifications, localizations, and temporal dynamics in order to detect “hidden” disease signatures. Primary research interests (achievements):

Large-scale analysis of protein turnover rates in mouse, human, and drosophila
Plasma metabolite profiles of healthy human subjects and heart failure patients
Protein phosphorylation signaling in cardiac mitochondria.
Cloud-based bioinformatics platform for analysis, annotation, and integration of large-scale proteomics and metabolomics datasets (MetProt)

Mitochondrial Biology of Heart Diseases. The Ping lab has a longstanding emphasis on understanding the regulation of cardiac mitochondria in energetics and metabolism, and their roles in the development of heart diseases. We utilize cutting-edge proteomics and biochemistry methods to understand the signaling pathways and organization of cardiac mitochondrial proteome in the heart, with particular interest in the regulatory relationships between protein expression level, organelle functions, and cardiac phenotypes. Primary research interests:

Proteome design and function of cardiac mitochondria
Mitochondrial anatomy and functions following left ventricular assist device support
Signaling, regulation, and functional dynamics of protein degradation networks.

Honors and Awards

2022 The Dennis B. McNamara Award for Excellence in Cardiovascular Science (IACS and ISHR)
2021 Donald F. Hunt Distinguished Contribution in Proteomics Award, US Human Proteome Organization (US HUPO)
2018 Clinical & Translational Proteomics Award (International Human Proteome Organization, HUPO)
2017 NIH/NHLBI Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA) (2017-2023)
2017 Ken Bowman Research Achievement Award (Institute of CV Sciences at St-Boniface Hospital)
2015 Robert M. Berne Distinguished Lectureship, American Physiological Society (APS).
2013 Distinguished Service Award (HUPO)
2015 American Physiological Society (APS) Robert M. Berne Distinguished Lectureship
2013 Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) Distinguished Service Award
2012 American Heart Association (AHA) Distinguished Lectureships: Thomas W. Smith Memorial Lecture
2010-2020 NIH/NHLBI MERIT Award
2009 Research Achievement Award CNPN (Canadian National Proteomics Network)
2001 Provost’s Award for Exemplary Advising (University of Louisville)
2000 University Scholar (University of Louisville)
1998 Young Investigator Award (AHA)
1995 Melvin L. Marcus Young Investigator Award Finalist (AHA)
1995 Young Investigator Award Finalist (ISHR)
1994 Young Investigator Travel Award (AFCR)
1993 Young Investigator Award (AHA)
1993 Henry Christian Memorial Award (AFCR)
1993 Trainee Investigator Award (AAP, ASCI, AFCR)
1992 Caroline tum Suden Professional Opportunity Award (APS)
1990 Excellence in Research Award (AHA)
2009-current Fellow of International Society for Heart Research (FISHR)
2001-current Fellow of American Physiological Society
1998-current Fellow of American Heart Association (FAHA)

Department: Physiology

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