Yi Zhang

I am an Assistant Professor at Duke University as primary faculty in Department of Neurosurgery and secondary in Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. My passion sits at the intersection of computational method development and biomedical and genomics data. I did PhD in Bioengineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and postdoc at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University School of Public Health. We have been developing integrative computational genomic methods to identify functional gene regulatory mechanisms behind disease-associated human genetic variants, machine learning methods that leverage large-scale single-cell genomics data to understand cell states in tumor. My lab at Duke focuses on computational biology, bioinformatics, and machine learning in genomics. Our research interest includes developing interpretable machine learning methods for patient-based single-cell, spatial transcriptomics, and multi-omics data, and also building integrative genomics methods that combines and functional genomics, to understand multi-cellular systems like tissues and tumor microenvironment, and to finally enable translational and biomedical discoveries.