Cong Liang – About

I am an assistant professor at the Center for Applied Mathematics at Tianjin University, China. I graduated from the interdepartmental PhD program of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Yale University in May 2018. For my thesis research, I worked in Dr. Günter P. Wagner's lab on models of cell type evolution. Before that, I received bachelor's degree from Peking University in physics in 2012.

My research interest lies in the interdisciplinary area of evolutionary biology, dynamical modeling, and statistics. Cell types are semi-independent evolutionary units, and the number of cell types are correlated with body plan complexity. Understanding the origin of novel cell types and their functions will largely enhance our understanding of cellular functions and biodiversity. With the fast development of next generation sequencing techniques, immense functional and epigenetic datasets have been generated. There is a pressing need to improve the mathematical tools for analyzing comparative functional datasets in evolutionary biology studies.

Particularly, I am working on dynamical models to describe the evolution of cell types using functional genomic data. Because cells in the same organism share (largely) the same genomic information, one evolutionary change in the genome may influence multiple cell types at the same time. This correlated evolution phenomenon makes evolutionary inferences for cell types difficult using traditional parsimony and likelihood models, where independent evolution are assumed between different branches.

I am also interested in the biological and biomedical applications of statistical learning methods. One example is to use next generation sequencing data to decipher the cellular components of cancer tissues. More and more evidences have shown that the microenvironment of cancer tissues plays an important role in predicting cancer therapy response. Understanding the crosstalk between tumor cells and surrounding fibroblasts as well as inflitrating immune cells in the microenvironment is crucial in clinical studies.

Tianjin is a beautiful city with four seasons. Here is a glimpse of Tianjin University.