🧬 Research Vision

Decoding Microbial Life with AI & Metagenomics

My research lies at the intersection of computational biology, machine learning, and microbiology. I develop and apply deep learning models to explore massive metagenomic datasets, with the goals of describing planetary viral diversity and elucidating functions of novel genes.

🦠 Virology 🏷️ Functional Annotation 🧬 Microbiome

Core Research Directions

Biological Sequence Analysis

  • CRISPR-PAM: Metagenomic mapping of PAM preferences across millions of Cas9 proteins to expand targeting options.
  • DeepFRI: GNN-based function prediction directly from sequence-derived contact maps at database scale.
  • scikit-bio: Contributions to Python's core bioinformatic library for sequence analysis and diversity metrics.

Microbiome - Host Relationship

  • Probiotics: Clinical trial mapping multi-species probiotics response on gut microbiota functions in obese postmenopausal women.
  • Rhinosinusitis: Investigating spatial variability in chronic rhinosinusitis sinus microbiome, highlighting patient-specific differences.

Machine Learning

  • Metagenomic DeepFRI: Integrating deep-learning GNNs into bioinformatics pipelines to annotate novel gut microbial genes.
  • TM-Vec2: Lightweight sequence embedder trained via knowledge distillation to predict protein structure similarity (TM-scores) at scale.