Ran Zhang

I am an assistant professor at the School of Data Science and Society, UNC-Chapel Hill. Previously, I was a UW Data Science postdoctoral fellow with Dr. William Noble at the University of Washington. I did my undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University and my graduate studies at Princeton University, supervised by Dr. Olga Troyanskaya. My work is supported by the K99/R00 NIH Pathway to Independence Award from NHGRI.

I started my career as a wet lab biologist in undergraduate studies. I used a combination of experimental approaches – including imaging, biochemistry, and cell biology – to study autophagy in human cell lines and yeast. My graduate work is focused on integrating large-scale functional genomics datasets and applying network-based approaches to predict context-specific disease genes and pathways in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases and disorders. During my postdoc studies, I developed deep learning methods to integrate and translate single-cell multi-omics profiles across data modality, time, and species to generate biological hypotheses in biological contexts or data modalities where experimental measurement is scarce.

My lab’s research interests include:

Bulk and single-cell level cross-modality translation and integration
Cross-species prediction to transfer knowledge from model organisms to human
Characterizing genes and processes underlying complex human diseases and disorders

**We are actively seeking motivated undergraduate students, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers with interest/experience in the field of computational biology, data science, machine learning, and genomics. If you are interested in joining the group, please send your CV and a brief (within one page) summary of your research interests to ranzhang [at] unc.edu **