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Ao Zhang

PhD Student

Knowledge Discovery, Genomics, High-Performance Computing

[Research Interests]

Algorithms and knowledge discovery, genomics, and high-performance computing. I'm particularly interested in scalable computational models that extract structure and meaning from complex biological and clinical datasets.

[Bio]

I am currently a PhD researcher in Biostatistics and Health Informatics at King's College London, supervised by Dr. Nicholas Cummins, Dr. Srinivasan Vairavan (J&J), and Professor Richard Dobson.

Before starting my PhD, I completed an MSc in Genomic Medicine at the University of Oxford, where I developed [Phylokit], a scalable toolkit for phylogenetic analysis of large genomic datasets. I also hold a BSc in Computer Science from King's College London, where I collaborated with the Francis Crick Institute on an agent-based model of angiogenesis, exploring how cellular protrusions influence vascular pattern formation.

Beyond my degree projects, I've contributed to [Tskit], an open-source library for population-scale genealogy analysis, conducted research on spatial transcriptomics data using graph neural networks with the Whitehead Institute, and worked on time-series imputation and class imbalance problems in healthcare data [PyPOTS].

My work integrates algorithm design, genomics, and high-performance computing, aiming to create scalable, interpretable systems for biomedical knowledge discovery.

Key Projects:

[Outside Research]

Hiking, making (and drinking) coffee, fixing things that don't work, assembling things that come in too many parts, and reading philosophy—especially when I should be debugging something else.

→ Note: If anyone's interested in opening a coffee shop somewhere in the woods or up a mountain, please contact me. I'll bring the beans, a toolkit, and possibly a WiFi router. ☕