News:

• Anne Bowcock (Genetics, WashU) and I received a Challenge grant (an NIH R01) under the Recovery Act to develop and apply systems biology approaches to study psoriasis, an inflammatory disease of the skin for which there is currently no cure.  (Septemer, 2009)
• Justin Fay (Genetics, WashU) and I received a Challenge grant (an NIH R01) under the Recover Act to study drug response using yeast as the model system. (Septemer, 2009)
• I am a co-PI of a newly funded NIH project (PI: Skip Virgin, Pathology and Immunology, WashU) supplemental to the center grant of Midwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.  (June, 2009)
  
• Anne Bowcock (Genetics, WashU) and I received a grant from Washington University Cancer Center to study small RNAs in prostate cancer. (June, 2009)
• I have received a Director's Award from WashU Alzeheimer's Disease Research Center for a study of small RNAs in Alzheimer brains.  (May, 2009)
• I have been invited to give a talk on transcriptional regulation at one of the symposia of the 9th International Plant Molecular Biology (IPMB) Congress, St. Louis, MO, Oct 25-30, 2009.  (May, 2009)
  
• I have been invited to give a talk on abiotic stress inducible miRNAs in plants at the 11th Danforth Plant Sciences Center Annual Fall Symposium, September, 23-25, 2009. (Feburary, 2009)
• I have been invited to give a talk at the Non-coding RNA and Aging Symposium, which is part of the 19th IAGG (Intern. Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics) World Congress, Paris, France, July 5-9, 2009.  (January, 2009)
• Starting January, 2009, I will be an Associate Editor of the international journal of Artificial Intellignece, the primary journal for the field of artificial intelligence.  (Dec. 2008)
• I have joined the Editorial Advisory Board of The Open Systems Biology Journal.  (August, 2008)
• I have recived a new NSF grant, jointly with Ralph Quatrano, professor in Dept. of Biology at WashU, to work on transcriptome analysis and applications to stress responses in plants.  (July, 2008)
• I will join J. of Alzheimer's Disease as an Associate Editor.  (July, 2008)
  
• I have joined PLoS Computational Biology as an Associate Editor.  (April, 2008)
• I will be an invited speaker at Gordon Conference on Salt & Water Stress in Plants, Sept. 7-12, 2008.  (November, 2007)
  
• I have received a grant from the Alzheimer's Association, a nonprofit organization, for our research on developing computational systems biology approaches to analyzing gene expression, modeling transcriptome, and identifying genetic risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer's disease, a leading dementia in aging population. (June, 2007)
  
• I have joined the editorial board of the international journal of Artificial Intellignece, the primary journal for the field of artificial intelligence.  (Dec. 2006)
  
• I have given an invited talk on Data mining methods for modeling gene expression regulation and their applications at The 2006 IEEE Intern. Conf. on Data Mining.  (Dec. 2006)
  
• The MaxPlan planner developed by the Washington University Team - Zhao Xing, Yixin Chen and Weixiong Zhang - won the First Place Prize for the Optimal Planning Track of the 5th International Planning Competition at the 16th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2006.  (July, 2006)
  

Education:

• Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
• B.S. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Research Interests:

• Computational systems biology (machine learning/datamining methods for feature extraction, selection and classification as well as their applications to molecular biology and genomics - e.g., cis-element identification, gene identification and selection, non-coding small RNAs and their regulatory functions, gene regulatory networks, stress tolerance and regulation in plants, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's disease), and haplotype inference)

• Artificial Intelligence (heuristic search, phase transitions in complex systems, planning and scheduling, constraint satisfaction and optimization, resource allocation in multi-agent systems and sensor networks)

• Combinatorial optimization (e.g., Traveling Salesman and Boolean satisfiability) and search algorithms

Contact Information:

Email: zhang AT cse DOT wustl DOT edu
Phone: (314)935-8788; Fax: (314)935-7302
Office: Jolley Hall, Room 528

Mailing Address:

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University
Campus Box 1045
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899