CS&E PhD Student Xiang Zhang Won Best Talk Award at GLBIO Conference
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) PhD student Xiang Zhang recently won the Best Talk Award at the 17th Great Lakes Bioinformatics (GLBIO) conference in Minneapolis for his presentation titled, "A deep learning approach for predicting synthetic lethality in human cells.”
Zhang’s presentation focused on predicting synthetic lethal gene pairs in human cancer cells using advanced machine learning models trained on biological data. For example, large-scale CRISPR-Cas9 screens help identify gene pairs that are harmless on their own but deadly when both are disrupted, offering a way to selectively kill cancer cells.
“There are gene pairs where the mutation of either gene has little impact, while the mutations of both genes will kill the cancer cell,” Zhang said. “Those are the targets we are looking for. We want to build an AI model to predict millions of such pairs, so that we can greatly facilitate the field of cancer therapeutic target discovery.”
Zhang’s work would not be possible without the support from CS&E faculty and staff to make sure he can match every milestone in his PhD process. Zhang was inspired to pursue this topic after taking the graduate level computational biology course CSCI 5461: Functional Genomics, Systems Biology, and Bioinformatics with his advisor, professor Chad Myers. During that course, he was able to develop his computational biology skills and explored the domain of “AI for Science”. Zhang credits Dr. Myers for both his support and mentorship that have been instrumental in the development of the project presented at this conference.
“The tons of biological data out there is a gold mine and advanced computational skills are required to help people decipher useful information,” Zhang said. “Helping advance cancer research is very motivating for me, since my grandpa passed away from pancreatic cancer. I want to take advantage of my computer science skill set to help with cancer treatment advancements.”
Zhang has received an offer for a postdoctoral opportunity at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where he will continue to pursue his research on developing computational methods for identifying promising cancer therapeutic targets.
“This award gave me confidence to keep pushing forward in this field,” Zhang said. “I am not done yet - I still have many ideas I want to explore. Being recognized at this conference reassured me that I am on the right path. It’s meaningful work, and it’s encouraging to know that others see its value.”