(1954-2018)

University of Missouri-Kansas City faculty member and renowned researcher Shui Qing Ye, M.D., Ph.D., died on Oct. 24 following a prolonged illness.

Visitation will be from 2 to 3 p.m. and the memorial service will be from 3 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 3 at Mt. Moriah, Newcomer and Freeman Funeral Home, 10507 Holmes Road, Kansas City, Missouri 64131.

A professor in the School of Medicine’s departments of pediatrics and biomedical and health information, Ye served as the William R. Brown / Missouri Endowed chair in Medical Genetics and Molecular Medicine. He had also served as the school’s chair of Biomedical and Health Informatics and was director of the Division of Experimental and Translational Genetics and Core of Omic Research at Children’s Mercy. He is survived by wife and research collaborator, Li Qin Zhang, an associate professor at the UMKC School of Medicine, and daughter, YuMin Ye.

“Our hearts are broken,” said Mary Anne Jackson, interim dean at the UMKC School of Medicine and his colleague at Children’s Mercy. “He was a dedicated faculty member and excellent researcher, but above all that, he was one of the kindest people I have known.”

An expert in genomic and translational bioinformatics, Ye had a strong track record of using new-age tools to gather and explore Big Data. He was a highly active researcher, partnering with local and worldwide scientists to pinpoint new diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for human diseases.

“He was a fellow University of Chicago graduate, co-author, co-teacher and briefly, I had the privilege of having him as the chair of the department where I hold a courtesy appointment in the UMKC School of Medicine — I already miss him terribly,” said Gerald J. Wyckoff, interim chair of the Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UMKC School of Pharmacy. “He was a rare individual with a true appreciation not only for the results of science, but for the process of science. He enriched a lot of lives; mine included.”

A principal investigator or co-investigator for many National Institutes of Health-funded research studies, Ye served on grant review panels for the NIH-National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense and the American Heart Association.

He authored two highly acclaimed books on bioinformatics and Big Data: Bioinformatics — A Practical Approach, published in 2007, and “Big Data Analysis for Bioinformatics and Biomedical Discoveries,” published in 2016.

Before joining UMKC faculty in 2010, Ye served as director of the Gene Expression Profiling Core at the Center of Translational Respiratory Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also served as director of the Molecular Resource Core at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

Ye earned his medical degree from Wuhan University School of Medicine at Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in lipid metabolism at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, and received his Ph.D. in molecular mechanisms of disease from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.