Dr. Cuncong Zhong obtained his BS in Biotechnology and BS in Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2007. He continued his study in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, and received his MS and PhD in Computer Science in 2009 and 2013, respectively. During his PhD study, he conducted research in noncoding RNA secondary structure under the supervision of Dr. Shaojie Zhang. After that, he joined J. Craig Venter Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, where he developed a suite of computational tools for metagenomic data analysis under the supervision of Dr. Shibu Yooseph. At 2016, he moved to the Department of Electircal Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor. You can find his CV [here].

Dr. Xiangtao Liu obtained his BS/MS in Physics from Peking University, then PhD in Aplied Mathematics from Yale University. His PhD study involved fast algorithms, methods for GWAS, and mathematical modeling for biological systems. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, postdoctoral researcher at the Ohio State University and associate research scientist at University of Iowa, built pipelines for next-generation sequencing data analyses and contributed to studies on psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, and cancers. He also had experience in develpment of genetic screening products for cancer and epilepsy patients, as a lead scientist at Cipher Gene LLC and Tianjia Genomes Tech. Co. Ltd. in China. He has a broad range of research interests in metagenomics, cancer genomics, epigenomics, genetics and biomarker discovery, machine learning methods and biostatistics. You can find his CV [here].

Ms. Sirisha Thippabhotla obtained her Bachelors degree in Computer Science from VNRVJIET (Hyderabad, India) in 2014. She briefly worked as an Assistant Systems Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services in 2015. She then went on to receive her Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 2017. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas. She is broadly interested in developing efficient computational tools for metagenomic data analysis, under the supervision of Dr. Cuncong Zhong. You can find her CV [here].

Mr.Ben Liu’s research interests are taxonomic and functional analyzing the biological and medical data, including RNA-Seq, 16S rRNA amplicon, shot-gun sequencing. His previous research experiences include developed an algorithm called DRAGoM to detect ncRNA homologous paths and reads from metagenomic data, prediction of long-term response to immunotherapy in lung cancer patients using gut microbiome functional profile. You can find her CV [here].

Mr.Hao Xuan’s research interests are bioinformatics programs for sequence searching and functional analyzing the biological data. He is interested in developing a multi-purpose aligner for short and long nucleotide and peptide sequences mapping. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas, under the supervision of Dr. Cuncong Zhong. You can find her CV [here].

Mr. Adam Podgorny's obtained his B.S. in Microbiology in 2011 and B.S. in interdisciplinary computing in 2018. His research foci include miRNA target prediction, metagenomics and assembly, and regulatory network dynamics. The integration of machine learning into these areas, along with advanced inferential techniques informed by Information Theory, are of particular interest. Past areas of work have involved machine learning and spatial analysis for catalytic enzymes, and chromosome separation dynamics in E. Coli.

Mr. Xi Mo received both his B.E. Degree in automation, and M.S. Degree in physics at Beihang University. He's now a Ph.D. candidate majored in Electrical Engineering at University of Kansas. His research interests including machine learning and pattern recognition applications, 2D/3D computer vision and deep learning in robotics and bioinformatics. You can find his CV [here].

Mr. Tianxiao Zhang obtained his Master's degree from the University of Southern California. He is currently doing his PhD at the University of Kansas. His research interests are in the broad areas of computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning. You can find his CV [here].

Ms. Xiangyu Chen obtained her Bachelor's degree from Nanjing University of Science & Technology, China, and her Master’s Degree from Southeast University, China. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, focusing on computer vision and deep learning. You can find her CV [here].

Mr. Kaidong Li obtained his Bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and Master's degree from the University of Southern California, CA. He is currently doing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Kansas with a focus on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. You can find his CV [here].