Yuanyuan Zhang

Yuanyuan Zhang

she/her

PhD student

About me

I am a fifth-year PhD student from the Department of Computer Science of Purdue University under the supervision of Prof. Daisuke Kihara. My research area is computational biology, mainly focus on protein structure prediction, structure modeling and evaluation in Cryo-EM.

In summer 2024, I was a research intern at the University of Washington, where I worked on projects in generative and self-supervised learning. I was involved in developing HiCFoundation, a foundational masked autoencoder model for analyzing Hi-C genomic data, and CryoNeRF, a novel method that leverages Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for enhanced Cryo-EM 3D reconstruction. I continued my research in Summer 2025 at Samsung SDS America, working on the post-training phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) and leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve the performance of distilled LLMs.

Before join Purdue, I graduated with a master’s degree in computer science from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China in 2021. During my master, I mainly worked on natural language processing about multi-modal sentiment analysis in Key Lab of Web Data Science and Technology from Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to that, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in computer sciecne from Sichuan University in 2018. During the summer of 2017, I worked with Dr. Xiwei Liu and Prof.Fei-Yue Wang from State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems of Chinese Academy of Sciences, doing research about intelligent education.

You can find my CV here

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