New faculty spotlight: Shibiao Wan, PhD

Shibiao Wan, PhD, is a new faculty member at UNMC.

• Name: Shibiao Wan, PhD
• Hometown: Hubei, China
• Title and department at UNMC: Assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy, and assistant director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Core Facility

Research/professional interests: Bioinformatics, machine learning and computational biology, especially in single cell analysis, multi-omics analysis, spatial transcriptomics and machine learning for processing large-scale biological data.

How I fell in love with bioinformatics: Being trained in a computational background, I was later fascinated by the power of bioinformatics that unravels biomedical mechanisms from tons of data in biology and medicine. Recently, being equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning, bioinformatics has been increasingly essential for addressing fundamental biological questions like protein 3D structure prediction, single cell analysis and spatial transcriptomics. I am excited to leverage bioinformatics and machine learning to tackle more intriguing biomedical questions.

Education:

• BS in telecommunications engineering, Wuhan University
• PhD in bioinformatics and machine learning, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• Postdoctoral fellow in bioinformatics and machine learning, Princeton University
• Postdoctoral fellow in bioinformatics and machine learning, University of Pennsylvania

Memberships:

• International Society of Computational Biology
• Association of Computing Machinery
• Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Three things people may not know about me:  

• I play Chinese chess, Go and international chess.
• I like traveling and experiencing different culture and food.
• Besides English and Mandarin, I can speak Japanese and Cantonese.