About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Michigan, working with Dr. Tzumin Lee and Dr. Tomer Stern. My current research investigates how developmental history is converted into precise neural wiring in the Drosophila brain, combining lineage-resolved single-cell transcriptomics, intact-brain RNA imaging, and computational reconstruction to understand how evolving combinations of cell-surface adhesion genes guide neurons to form the right connections.

During my PhD with Dr. Joshua Welch, I developed computational and machine learning methods for spatial transcriptomics, including CytoSignal (Nature Genetics) for detecting cell-cell signaling at cellular resolution and TopoVelo (Nature Biotechnology) for inferring spatial cell fate transitions. My work bridges computational method development, spatial genomics, and developmental neurobiology.

Research Interests

• Neural Circuit Wiring
• Spatial Transcriptomics
• Single-Cell Genomics
• Cell-Surface Adhesion Codes
• Computational Method Development
• Developmental Neurobiology

Awards & Funding

• CZI Data Insights Cycle 2 (Co-PI, $397,108), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 2023
  • Detecting signaling among single cells from spatial transcriptomic data
• Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Michigan, 2023
• Dean’s Fellowship, ShanghaiTech University, 2014