Research

Research Interests

  • Applied combinatorics
  • Bioinformatics: phylogenetic analysis, comparative genomics, protein networks, cancer genomics, COVID-19
  • Data science
  • Algorithms and theory of computing

Research Description
My research takes places in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology in comparative and evolutionary genomics. My current research objectives include developing mathematical models, efficient algorithms, and software tools for comparing DNA and protein sequences, revealing the evolution of gene families and genome organization, and studying the structural and dynamic mechanisms governing cellular protein networks.

Recently, I am interested in different bioinformatic issues of cancer genomics and other issues of data science and machine learning in healthcare.

Selected Publications

  • Zhang L, Abhari N, Colijn C, Wu Y. A fast and scalable method for inferring phylogenetic networks from trees by aligning lineage taxon strings. Genome Research, 2023: gr.277669.123. Doi:10.1101/gr.277669.123.
  • Cardona G, Zhang LX. Counting tree-child networks and their subclasses. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 2020.
  • Zheng Y, Zhang L. (2017) Reconciliation with nonbinary gene trees revisited. Journal of the ACM, 64:24.
  • Zhang L. (2016) On tree-based phylogenetic networks. Journal of Computational Biology, 23:553-65.
  • Gambette P, Gunawan AD, Labarre A, Vialette S, Zhang L. (2015) Locating a tree in a phylogenetic network in quadratic time. RECOMB 2015, pp. 96-107. Springer, NY, USA.
  • Tran NH, Choi KP, Zhang L. (2013) Counting motifs in the human interactome. Nature Communications, 4:2241.
  • Li G, Steel M, Zhang L. (2008) More taxa are not necessarily better for the reconstruction of ancestral character states. Systematic biology, 647-53.
  • Ma B, Li M, Zhang L. (2000) From gene trees to species trees. SIAM Journal on Computing., 30:729-52.
  • Ma B, Zhang L. (2015) Fundamentals of Bioinformatics (生物信息学基础教程) (in Chinese), Higher Education Press, China.