Hongyu Zhao, Ph.D.
Ira V. Hiscock Professor of Biostatistics, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science and Professor of Genetics at Yale UniversityÂ
Recent advances in spatial-omics technologies have generated a growing number of
diverse datasets, offering unprecedented opportunities to explore tissue organization and
function within spatial contexts. However, it remains a significant challenge to analyze these
data effectively. In this talk, Zhao will introduce several approaches for integrating and interpreting spatial-omics data, including a deep learning method that incorporates non-negative matrix factorization, enabling the discovery of interpretable spatial factors with corresponding gene programs; a statistical method for the robust inference of spatial co expression and cell–cell communication from spatially-resolved transcriptomics data; and a computational method for the identification of effects of microenvironments on gene programs from spatially perturbed data.
About Hongyu Zhao
Zhao received his bachelor's degree in probability and statistics from Peking University in 1990 and his doctorate in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. His research interests are the developments and applications of novel statistical methods to address scientific questions in genetics, molecular biology, drug developments, and precision medicine.
Some of his recent projects include large scale genome wide studies to identify genetic variants underlying complex diseases, genetic risk prediction, single cell analysis, biological network modeling and analysis, disease biomarker identification, genome annotation, cancer genomics, microbiome analysis, image analysis, and wearable device data analysis. He has published over 700 articles in statistics, human genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics, and edited three books on human genetics analysis and statistical genomics. He has trained over 110 doctoral and post-doctoral students, many of whom are holding tenured or tenure-track positions at major universities in the states and overseas.
Zhao has served as an editor and/or associate editor of leading statistical and genetics journals, including as a co-editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association Theory and Methods and a co-editor of Statistics in Biosciences. He was the recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award for a top statistician in health statistics under the age of 40 awarded by the American Public Health Association and the Pao-Lu Hsu Award from the International Chinese Statistical Association. His research has also been recognized by the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation by UC Berkeley, a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award by the March of Dimes Foundation, election to the fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.