Jessica L. Zhou

Hi! I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory working on developing trustworthy and explainable AI. I’m interested in machine learning, statistics, and regulatory genomics.

I graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2017. From 2019-2020, I worked as a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin, Germany. I obtained my PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of California San Diego in 2023. During my time there, I worked on analyzing single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) data to better understand cocaine addiction, and also developed statistical models for analyzing single-cell CRISPR screens to better understand how enhancers work to regulate gene expression. In my current position, I have been developing and benchmarking a method for training uncertainty-aware neural networks for predicting genomic sequence function. My goal is to improve the trustworthiness, explainability, and calibration of genomic sequence models.

On my GitHub, you can find some pipelines for analysis and simulation of scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq data, as well as some Jupyter notebooks with tutorials for statistics and ML concepts.

I speak English, Mandarin and German.

Refer to my Google Scholar for my publications. You can view my CV here.