Wei Zhang

Bio

Dr. Wei Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Genomics and Bioinformatics Cluster at the University of Central Florida. His research interests include computational biology, machine learning, and biomedical informatics. His research has centered on investigating the role of transcriptome variants in diseases, spanning from technique-driven research (e.g., algorithm development for disease outcome prediction), to the hypothesis-driven investigation of specific biological problems. Specifically, Dr. Zhang has developed several advanced machine learning algorithms and computational tools for mining biomarkers of different disease phenotypes from large-scale multi-omics data. The models and frameworks have been widely used by many research groups and biologists. In the past four years, Dr. Zhang's work has been published in top-tier journals such as Briefings in Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, etc. During the last five years at the University of Central Florida, Dr. Zhang has recruited five Ph.D. students, four master students, and six undergraduate research trainees in the lab and published 25 journal articles and nine conference papers. Dr. Zhang has a short-term working experience in a pharmaceutical company, which extended his knowledge of biological applications and enabled him to better match his research to real market needs. Dr. Zhang has been collaborating with molecular biologists and clinicians for more than ten years, which added to his expertise in the computer science field.