I am excited to be a first-year PhD student in the Statistics program at Texas A&M University since Fall 2024. I recently completed a research visit at Jian Yang's Lab at Westlake University, which further enriched my research experience before starting my doctoral studies.
Throughout my academic career, I have been recognized for excellence - receiving the prestigious National Scholarship from the Ministry of Education of China (top 0.2% of students nationally) and ranking first among my peers multiple times.
Under the supervision of Prof. Jun Chen at Mayo Clinic and Prof. Liangliang Zhang at Case Western Reserve University, my research has predominantly centered around microbiome data analysis. As a research assistant at Mayo Clinic, I played a pivotal role in the development and refinement of the MicrobiomeStat R package tailored for longitudinal data analysis. This involved writing over 17,000 lines of R code and diligently crafting an extensive wiki documentation exceeding 20,000 words. Currently, I am also actively working on a Shiny version of MicrobiomeStat, with the development progress already reaching halfway. It's heartening to note that renowned labs are harnessing the power of MicrobiomeStat for their microbiome analyses. Specifically, UCSD's gilbert-lab is utilizing MicrobiomeStat for a large-scale marine microbiome cohort analysis.
Moreover, my passion led me to spearhead the MicrobiomeGallery collaborative platform, emphasizing my dedication to the domain.
At Case Western Reserve University, I had the privilege of being the sole first author on a paper accepted by Bioinformatics, featuring the ggpicrust2 R package. This tool, which I independently developed, offers a new perspective on microbiome functional profiling. As of August 2024, the GitHub repository has garnered 97 stars, demonstrating its growing recognition in the scientific community. The package's popularity continues to soar, with over 13,000 downloads on CRAN, indicating its widespread adoption and utility in the field of microbiome research.
I have been honored with notable accolades in various national modeling competitions, attesting to my robust quantitative aptitude. Specifically, I was awarded the First Prize in the National College Student Mathematics Competition and received the Meritorious Winner (M Award) in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) organized in the United States.
Collaboration and Co-Authorship
I am highly open to and enthusiastic about collaborative opportunities, particularly in the areas of microbiome, multi-omics, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics data analysis. With significant experience in using tools like ggpicrust2 and MicrobiomeStat, I have witnessed their impactful contributions to advancing research in these fields. My expertise extends to the upstream analysis of single-cell, spatial transcriptomics, and microbiome data, and I would be glad to collaborate on projects requiring these skills. If you have utilized these tools or are planning to do so, I am more than willing to offer substantial support, potentially as a co-author. Please don't hesitate to reach out via email if I can assist in any way, and I would warmly welcome co-authorship for any contributions I make.
Recent News
Major Achievement: On June 26th, 2024, I was awarded the inaugural Su Binghua Distinguished Biostatistics Scholarship ($2,800) by Tigermed, recognizing rising stars in biostatistics across mainland China. This honor is particularly noteworthy as I was the only undergraduate recipient among PhD candidates, highlighting the exceptional nature of this accomplishment. The scholarship is named after Professor Su Binghua, a pioneer in clinical trials in China and a key figure in advancing biostatistics and clinical research methodologies in the country.
As of August 27th, 2024, the citation count for ggpicrust2 has reached an impressive 46 citations, further solidifying the package's significant impact and growing recognition within the scientific community.
As of March 16th, 2024, the ggpicrust2 R package has been downloaded over 9,800 times on CRAN, showcasing its widespread adoption and popularity among users.
On August 5th, 2023, I completed the manuscript, code, and documentation for MicrobiomeStat, a comprehensive R package for longitudinal microbiome data analysis, with plans to submit to Bioinformatics in August.
On August 1st, 2023, my paper ggpicrust2: an R package for PICRUSt2 predicted functional profile analysis and visualization was published online in Bioinformatics.
On April 27th, 2023, the arXiv preprint of ggpicrust2 surpassed 500 reads on ResearchGate, placing it in the top 1% of most-read papers for the year 2023.
