About Me
I am an incoming Ph.D. student at the Bioinformatics interdepartmental program at UCLA. Before that, I was a bioinformatician at the University of Pittsburgh, working with Dr. Wei Chen. I completed my master's degree in Information Science at the University of Michigan and my bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I was advised by Dr. Hongyi Xin.
My research interests lie at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and biology. I am particularly interested in developing computational methods for extracting the biologically meaningful information from large scale molecular level omics data.
Education
-
Ph.D. in Bioinformatics
University of California, Los Angeles
2025 - Present -
M.S. in Information Science
University of Michigan
2022 - 2024 -
B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
2019 - 2023
Academic Experience
-
Bioinformatician
University of Pittsburgh / UPMC Children's Hospital
2024 - 2025
Honors & Awards
- ACM SIGBio Best Paper Award, 2024
- ICIBM NSF Travel Award, 2024
- Shanghai Outstanding Graduate, 2023
Publications
-
Z Rong, J Cai, J Qiu, P Xu, LX Garmire, Q Lian, H Xin. (2024).
L2 Normalization and Geodesic Distance for Enhanced Information Preservation in Visualizing High-dimensional Single-cell Sequencing Data.
ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics
(ACM SIGBio Best Paper award) -
H Hu, X Wang, S Feng, Z Xu, J Liu, E Heidrich-O’Hare, Y Chen, M Yue, L Zeng, Z Rong, T Chen, T Billiar, Y Ding, H Huang, RH Duerr, W Chen. (2024).
A unified model-based framework for doublet or multiplet detection in single-cell multiomics data.
Nature Communications -
Z Zhang, C Zhang, N Liu, S Qi, Z Rong, SC Zhu, S Cui, Y Yang. (2024).
Heterogeneous Value Alignment Evaluation for Large Language Models.
AAAI-24 Workshop on Public Sector LLMs: Algorithmic and Sociotechnical Design
(oral)
Conferences
Talks
-
ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2024) (Presented by Jinpu Cai)
Shenzhen, China. Nov 2024. -
International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2024)
Houston, TX, USA. Oct 2024.
Attended
-
STATGEN 2025
Minneapolis, MN, USA. May 2025. -
STATGEN 2024 (American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics - Conference on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA. May 2024. -
MSU scRNAseq Workshop
East Lansing, MI, USA. Nov 2023.
Teaching
Teaching assistant at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- VE281 Programming and Data Structure, Summer 2023
- VE300 Technical Communication, Summer 2022
- VC211 Chemistry Lab, Spring 2021