About Me

My name is Songpeng Zu, coming from Liaoning Province, China. In July 2011, I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Biological Sciences in the School of Life Science at Tsinghua Univeristy. Then started my PhD studies in Control Science and Engineer supervised by Prof. Shao Li in the Department of Automation, Tsinghua Univeristy and got my PhD Degree in Jan 2017. My thesis focused on applying statistical machine learning in predicting drug-protein interactions.

I had near three-year industrial experience on deep learning. In Jan 2017, after my graduetion, I went to the recommendation team in HULU as a machine learning researcher. In Nov 2018, I joined the CityBrain Lab under DAMO Academy, Alibaba.

After that, inspired by AlphaFold and also my collegues, I decided to follow my major interests on developing tools for biological data analysis. And I believe it’s also the right time and right field for artifical intelligence. In Aug 2019, I became a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Jun Liu’s lab at Harvard University to develop statistical methods for single-cell sequencing data analysis. From July 2021 till now, I am a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Bing Ren’s lab at Univeristy of California, San Diego, where I study epigenetics and neuroscience by analyzing large-scale ATAC-seq data on the whole mouse brain.

Recent News

• Nov, 2023. My paper of “Single-cell analysis of chromatin accessibility in the adult mouse brain” is accepted by Nature, 2023.
• Aug, 2023. I gave an oral presention on Cell Symposia: The Conceptual Power of Single Cell Biology at San Diego, CA.
• Nov, 2022. As the guest association editor of Frontier in Drug Discovery, together with Dr. Shang Su, we are organizing a research topic of Discover and Design: Emerging Targeted Protein Degradation (TPD) Approaches and Modalities for Cancer Treatment.
• Nov, 2022. I have an oral presentation on Nanosymposium of Epigenetic and Transcriptomic Cell Type Atlas of the Whole Mouse Brain at Neuroscience 2022. My talk is about the comprehensive single-cell analysis of chromatin accessibility in the adult mouse brain.
• April, 2022. I have an oral presentation in virtue at Center of Mathematical Science and Applications (CMSA) Interdisciplinary sience seminar at Harvard University on single-cell RNA sequencing imputation strategy preserving gene modulees and cell clusters variation.
• July, 2021. I leave Harvard, and come to Prof. Bing Ren’s lab in UCSD as a postdoc.
• Feb, 2021. I have a baby in Cambridge!
• August 31, 2020. SIMPLEs is finally accepted to NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics after being rejected three times.
• March 14, 2020. VISAR is accepted to Bioinformatics. Congratulations, Qingyang!
• Feb 26, 2020. I get a funding support from the Harvard Data Science Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow Research Fund.

Academic Services

• Reviewer: Brieflings in Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics