About me
Hi, I am Jiannan! I am currently a final-year Ph.D. student in the School of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong, under the supervision of Prof. ZHANG Qingpeng. I obtained my B.E. in Geographical Information Science (GIS) from Nanjing University in 2019. I am also the CEO and founder of COMPASS Health Technology Limited, a start-up in Hong Kong.
Research Work and Interests
Over the past decades, Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown the huge potential to subvert the typical drug discovery process and disease diagnosis. My research lies in developing interpretable computational approaches to open the black-box of complex biological systems, for anti-cancer drug discovery, mental disorders risk prediction, and infectious disease modeling. Under the theme, I have developed several deep learning models based on biological networks: GraphSynergy for anti-cancer drug combination identification, iDPath for drug repurposing, BioXNet (in progress) for anti-cancer drug response prediction; Huge language models focusing on immune systems: ER-BERT (submitted) for de novo generation of epitope-binding T-Cell Receptor sequences. My research has been published in reputable journals such as Briefings in Bioinformatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), European Radiology, Chaos, as well as featured in mainstream media including 信報, 大公報, 星島日報, 東網, Daily Mail, The Standard, SCIENMAG, EurekAlert!, and so on.
Experiences
- 2022.07-2022.09, Intern of Medical AI Algorithm Research Group, Tencent AI Lab, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
- 2021.06-2021.08, Visiting Scholar, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
- 2018.09-2018.10, Visiting Student, Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, US.
- 2018.07-2018.09, Visiting Student, Department of Environmental Science, University of California - Riverside, Riverside, California, US.
Venture Project
I am the CEO and founder of COMPASS Health Technology Limited, which is a start-up based in Hong Kong, aims to build an AI-based platform for precision medicine and facilitate the discovery of new anti-cancer drug combinational therapy.
- 2021.11, COMPASS obtained the seed fund from the HK Tech 300 programme with HKD 100,000 as financial grant.
- 2021.12, COMPASS was admitted into the HKSTP Ideation programme with HKD 100,000 as financial grant.
- 2022.11, COMPASS obtained the conditional approval of the HKSTP Incubation programme with HKD 1,200,000 as financial grant!
Honors and Awards
- Outstanding Academic Performance Award for Research Degree Students, City University of Hong Kong, 2021, 2022.
- Institutional Research Tuition Scholarship, City University of Hong Kong, 2021, 2022.
- Tencent Wiz Elite Talent Program (70 students honored across China), Tencent, 2022.
- Outstanding graduates, Nanjing University, 2019.
- China National Scholarship (top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2017.
- Gezongliang Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2017.
- People’s Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2017.