Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D in Operation Research and Management, China Agricultural University
• Visting Ph.D student in Bioinformatics, University of Toronto
• Postdoctoral fellow at McGill University Genome Centre, McGill University

Work experience

• Research Officer, National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada (2018 - present)
• Adjunct Professor, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada (2023 - present)
• Adjunct Professor, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada (2022 - present)
• Bioinformatics Consultant, McGill University, Montreal, Canada (2016 - 2018)
• Research Assistant Professor, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (2011 - 2013)

Services and Outreach

• Editorial Board, BMC Genomics
• Associated Editor at Frontiers in Genetics
• External Reviewer for New Frontiers in Research Fund–Transformation, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, NSERC discovery grant and Impact Canada grant
• Internal Reviewer for NRC New Beginnings Initiatives
• Reviewer for over 20 different journals and conferences
• Organizer of DT Lunch&Learn seminar (2019-2022)
• Technical Chair of NRC Quantum Computing Workshop (2020)

Honors and Awards

• Editorial Contribution Award 2026, BMC Genomics
• Excellent in Research Award, 2025, DT, NRC
• Outstanding Contribution Award, 2020, DT, NRC
• Studentship from The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, 2015
• Graduate Scientific Achievement Award, CAU, 2010
• Second-class Young-scholar Paper Award by Beijing Operation Research Society, 2007

Student Supervising

• Nianxiao Che (Undergraduate, University of Waterloo, co-op student 2026), project: Predicting Cellular and Clinical Phenotypes from scRNA-seq Using AI
• Yushan Hu (Co-supervised Ph.D student, University of Victoria, 2023-2025), thesis: Advancing Cell-Type Annotation and Deconvolution in Human Bronchoalveolar Lavage Through Single-Cell Transcriptomics and Benchmarking Protocols
• Kailun Bai (Co-supervised Ph.D student, University of Victoria, 2022-2025), thesis: Deep Learning Methods for Cell Type Annotation in Single-cell RNA Sequencing
• Hassan Lezzeik (Co-supervised Master student, University of Ottawa, 2024-2025), project: Improving the Fidelity and Generalizability of an ODE Model of Muscle Regeneration Using Single-Cell RNA-seq Data
• Tian Wang (Undergraduate, University of Toronto, co-op student 2024), project: Development of epiClocks with DNA methylation sequencing data and its applications to AD risk prediction
• Praveen Guttula (Co-supervised Postdoc, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute & Univesity of Ottawa, 2022-2024), project: AI powered design of stem cell therapy for degenerative muscle diseases
• Renad Al-Ghazawi (Co-supervised Master student, University of Ottawa, 2021-2023), thesis project: Computational modeling of muscle regeneration dynamics from time-series single cell gene expression data
• Orhan Sari (Undergraduate, McGill University, summer 2020 & summer 2021), project: in silico CRISPR-Cas9 off-target effect prediction
• Saif Zabarah (Master co-op student, University of Ottawa, winter 2019), project: DNA methylation imputation using machine learning