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Faculty Members

Huaxiu Yao, PhD

March 6, 2025

Huaxiu Yao, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computer Science & School of Data Science and Society

Resource Faculty
Phone: N/A | Office: 254 Sitterson Hall
Email: huaxiu@cs.unc.edu | Website: https://www.huaxiuyao.io/aiming-lab

Research Areas: Bioinformatics, Computational Genomics, Computational Systems Biology, Image Analysis
Research Interests: My research focuses on building generalizable and well-aligned foundation models (e.g., LLMs, VLMs) with applications in healthcare and medicine.

Yusha Liu, PhD

December 5, 2024

Yusha Liu, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biostatistics

Core Faculty
Phone: N/A | Office:
Email: yushaliu@unc.edu | Website: https://sph.unc.edu/adv_profile/yusha-liu/

Research Areas: Statistical genomics
Research Interests: Flexible and scalable statistical approaches to analyze large-scale and complex genomics data, such as single cell data, and ultimately contributing to the understanding of complex diseases like cancer and the development of targeted therapy and prevention strategies.

Parul Johri

November 14, 2024

Parul Johri, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biology and Genetics

Core Faculty
Phone: 919-843-7700 | Office: 3157 Genome Sciences Building
Email: pjohri@unc.edu | Website: https://www.johrilab.org/

Research Areas: Population Genetics, Evolutionary Genomics, Statistical Inference
Research Interests: Our lab is interested in how evolutionary processes like changes in population size, recombination rate, direct and indirect effects of selection, and factors such as genome architecture shape patterns of genomic variation. Work in the lab involves employing computational, theoretical, and statistical approaches, including method development, to perform evolutionary inference and ask fundamental questions in population genetics. Areas of research: inference of selection and demography, evolution of gene duplicates, and population genetics in unicellular pathogenic species.

Tarek Zikry

November 4, 2024

Tarek Zikry, PhD

Assistant Professor of School of Data Science and Society (Starting July 2025)

Core Faculty
Phone: N/A | Office: ITS Manning School of Data Science and Society
Email: tarek@unc.edu | Website: http://www.zikrylab.com/

Research Areas: Bioinformatics, Computational Genomics, Computational Systems Biology, Statistical and Population Genetics
Research Interests: I am interested in the intersection of precision medicine and and data science, specifically topics in dimensionality reduction, single-cell omics, and statistical machine learning across applications in cancer, neuroscience, and public health.

Daiwei (David) Zhang

October 21, 2024

Daiwei (David) Zhang, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Genetics

Core Faculty
Phone: (919) 966-7281 | Office: 3107E McGavran-Greenberg Hall
Email: daiwei_zhang@med.unc.edu | Website: https://sph.unc.edu/adv_profile/david-zhang/

Research Areas: Image Analysis, Computational Genomics, Statistical and Population Genetics, Bioinformatics
Research Interests: My research focuses on developing novel artificial intelligence / machine learning frameworks to advance critical biomedical and health care domains, including spatial omics, computational pathology, medical imaging and text analysis.