Zelin Zang

Zelin Zang

Research Assistant Professor(RAP) at HK Institute of Innovation, CAS. Focusing on AI for Science, Medical Foundation Models, and Deep Manifold Learning.

Hi, I am Zelin Zang 臧泽林

AI for Life Sciences & Medicine

19 CCF/CAAI-A 6 first-author, 3 co-first, 4 corr. author, 7 other author
11 CCF-B 5 first-author, 1 co-first, 2 corr. author, 3 other author
19 SCI Q1 6 first-author, 6 co-first, 0 corr. author, 7 other author
1251 Total Citations from Google Scholar

I am currently a Research Assistant Professor(RAP) at the Hong Kong Institute of Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with Prof. Zhen Lei (IEEE Fellow) and Prof. Jiebo Luo (IEEE Fellow).

My research lies at the intersection of AI Foundation Models and AI for Science, with a particular focus on Life Sciences and Medicine. I aim to develop interpretable, scalable, and robust AI systems to solve complex problems in single-cell biology, molecular modeling, and clinical diagnosis.

Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. from Zhejiang University (jointly trained with Westlake University), supervised by Prof. Stan Z. Li (IEEE Fellow). I was also a CSC Visiting Scholar at the National University of Singapore (NUS), advised by Prof. Yang You.

Openings

I am actively recruiting Interns and PhD Students (Jointly trained with Institute of Automation-CAS, Zhejiang University, or Westlake University).

We are looking for self-motivated students interested in:

  • Fundamental AI — Foundation Models, Representation Learning
  • AI for Life Science — Single-cell, Molecular Biology
  • Medical AI & AI Agents
  • AI + X — Interdisciplinary Research

If you are interested, please send your CV to zangzelin@gmail.com.

Research Interests

AI for Life Sciences Single-cell foundation models, molecular biology, phylogenetic inference (BioTree)
Medical AI Medical foundation models, RAG-based diagnostic reasoning, multi-agent systems
Fundamental AI Deep manifold learning, interpretable representation learning, geometric deep learning

* denotes equal contribution; † denotes corresponding author.

Selected Publications

Full list

AI / Manifold Learning

AI for Life Science & Medicine

News

Show 14 more news
  • [Mar 2026] Our paper “Adaptive Prototype-guided Personalized Propagation for Heterophilic Graphs with Missing Data” accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) (SCI Q1, Top AI/ML Journal).
  • [Feb 2026] Our paper “ReGenHOI: Unifying Reconstruction and Generation for 3D Human–Object Interaction Understanding” accepted by IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026 (CCF-A, Premier AI Conference).
  • [Feb 2026] Our paper “UniSurg: A Video-Native Foundation Model for Universal Understanding of Surgical Videos” posted on arXiv.
  • [Jan 2026] Two papers (CDBridge & Doloris) accepted by International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 (CCF-A, Premier AI Conference).
  • [Jan 2026] Our paper “A Medical Multimodal Diagnostic Framework Integrating Vision-Language Models and Logic Tree Reasoning” has been accepted by IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2026 (CCF-B, Top Signal Processing Conf).
  • [Jan 2026] Our paper “Multi-center multi-omics integration predicts individualized prognosis in medullary thyroid carcinoma” has been accepted by Nature Communications (SCI Q1, IF=15.7, Top Multidisciplinary Journal).
  • [Jan 2026] Our paper “MDTree” (Phylogenetic Inference) has been accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) (SCI, Top ML Journal).
  • [Dec 2025] Our survey “The Dawn of Agentic EDA: A Survey of Autonomous Digital Chip Design” posted on arXiv.
  • [Nov 2025] Three papers (MedLA, Cell-Aware & Departures) accepted to AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2026 (CCF-A, Premier AI Conference). MedLA & Cell-Aware selected for Oral Presentation (Top ~5%).
  • [Sep 2025] “CellScout” accepted by IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (CCF-A, SCI Q1, Top Visualization Journal).
  • [Sep 2025] One paper on 3D Hand-Instrument Interaction accepted by Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2025 (Top Medical AI Conf, CCF-B).
  • [Mar 2025] One paper on Time Series Fault Detection accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) (CCF-B, SCI Q1, IF=10.4).
  • [Feb 2025] Three Papers (MuST, FGeneBERT, PoincaréDMT) accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics (BIB) (CCF-B, SCI Q1, Top Bioinformatics Journal).
  • [Jan 2025] “DaCapo” accepted by IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025 (CCF-A, Premier AI Conference).

For a full list of publications, please refer to my Publications page.