I am a second-year CS PhD student at School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Prof. Yunan Luo. I have broad interests in computational biology and machine learning, with a particular focus on developing AI methods to aid real-world biological and medical research. Currently, I am studying how AI models can be used to understand and optimize protein function.

Previously, I obtained a B.E. in computer science from Tsinghua University. I was honored to have worked with Prof. Jie Tang at Tsinghua University and Prof. Maria Brbic, Prof. Jure Leskovec at Stanford. In the industry, I used to intern at Tencent Quantum Lab, working with Prof. Chang-Yu Hsieh and at Helixon, working with Prof. Jian Peng and Prof. Jianzhu Ma.

My first name is pronounced like ‘Zion’.

Publications

Rewiring protein sequence and structure generative models to enhance protein stability prediction
Ziang Li, Yunan Luo
RECOMB 2025
We developed SPURS (stability prediction using a rewired strategy), the SOTA protein stability predictor, to benifit protein engineering tasks, such as functional site discovery and fitness prediction.
[pdf] | [code]

Double-ended synthesis planning with goal-constrained bidirectional search
Kevin Yu, Jihye Roh, Ziang Li, Wenhao Gao, Runzhong Wang, Connor W. Coley
NeurIPS 2024 (Spotlight)
[pdf]

Toward universal cell embeddings: integrating single-cell RNA-seq datasets across species with SATURN
Yanay Rosen, Maria Brbić, Yusuf Roohani, Kyle Swanson, Ziang Li, Jure Leskovec
Nature Methods
[pdf]

Rethinking the Setting of Semi-supervised Learning on Graphs
Ziang Li *, Ming Ding *, Weikai Li, Zihan Wang, Ziyu Zeng, Yukuo Cen, Jie Tang
IJCAI 2022 (oral)
We highlight the issue of over-tuning in GNNs on the validation set.
[pdf] | [code]

Modeling Protein Using Large-scale Pretrain Language Model
Yijia Xiao, Jiezhong Qiu, Ziang Li, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Jie Tang
Pretrain@KDD 2021
The early research on Protein Language Models featured the largest Protein Language Model at the time.
[pdf] | [code]

More about me

1. My favorite sport is basketball and I usually play as a forward. I can shoot the three, so I can also serve as a center in a small lineup. And I have been a fan of LeBron James for more than 10 years!
2. I want to be an optimistic, cheerful and hard-working person with strong belief like Naruto Uzumaki.