Hao Yuan

Hi! I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Marcotte Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. I recently completed my Ph.D. at Michigan State University, where I worked in the Braasch Lab and Krishnan Lab.

I’m a computational biologist interested in using machine learning, statistics, and omics data to understand how biological systems function in different contexts and how they evolve over time.

During my Ph.D., I worked on several related problems, including:

1. using machine learning to organize and annotate omics metadata for better data reuse
2. integrating single-cell transcriptomics with GWAS to understand potential affected cell populations by complex diseases, along with associated genes and biological processes.
3. learning gene representations from interaction networks for predicting gene-disease association across tissue contexts
4. studying how genome duplication shaped brain cell-type evolution in teleost fishes through cross-species analysis.

In my postdoc, my research has shifted more toward proteomics, protein interactions, and protein-complex discovery, with a broader systems-level interest in how molecular interactions change across biological conditions and how interaction networks evolve across major evolutionary events.

Long term, I’m interested in developing computational methods that connect genes, proteins, and other molecular components into interpretable and experimentally testable models of biological systems, while also understanding how these systems evolve over time.