I am Haoling (Horus) Zhang, a Ph.D. student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, under the guidance of Prof. Jesper Tegnér
My research centers on modeling biological sequences, with a particular emphasis on defining and characterizing functional boundaries at both the coding sequence level and the genomic scale. I am also deeply engaged in developing noise-resilient machine learning models tailored to high-noise biological environments, enabling robust knowledge inference in complex living systems. In parallel, I work on synthetic biology and bioinformatics, focusing on synonymous codon optimization, missense variant effects, and DNA-based data storage. Beyond my technical contributions, I am committed to advancing scientific governance, including the development of evidence specifications for research software and disclosure protocols for hazardous biological sequences.
Before joining KAUST, I earned my bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Chongqing University of Technology in 2018. I then spent five years at BGI Research, where I specialized in DNA-based data storage and bioinformatics within a joint laboratory with Professor George Church at Harvard Medical School. My work has led to publications in high-impact journals such as Nature Computational Science, Nature Communications, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics. I was also honored to receive the Warren L. DeLano Memorial PyMOL Open-Source Fellowship from Schrödinger, Inc., becoming the first recipient from Asia. In addition, I serve as an early-career-researcher reviewer for Springer Nature.