I pursue open-world biomedical discovery. Just like how the player can explore the virtual world freely in modern video games, I use my research to help scientists conduct biomedical discovery freely in the open-world setting (e.g., the new sample could belong to a class we have never seen before). This line of research leads to important biomedical discovery, such as predicting cells of a novel cell type and annotating functions of a novel gene set. I developed computational approaches to advance representation, classification and interpretation in never-before-seen biomedicine.
My research has been used in major biomedical institutes, including Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, NIH Center of Excellence for Big Data Computing, Mayo Clinic, NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and Stanford School of Medicine. My current passion is about investigating the genetic factors of a rare birth defect phenylketonuria.