Image: Alumni Achievements This year, two senior Ph.D. students, Yongkai Chen and Shushan Xu, successfully defended their dissertations and have begun their postdoctoral training at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, respectively. At the same time, we are pleased to welcome two new members, Yingchuan Zhang and Meizhi Yu, who joined our group and have started contributing to several ongoing research directions. Research Highlights Our group continued to make steady progress across a wide range of projects. Haoran Lu published five peer-reviewed papers and received the ASA Early Career Travel Award (2025). His recent work spans optimal gene panel selection for targeted spatial transcriptomics in collaboration with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, machine learning for non-invasive asthma diagnosis with JILA at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Raman spectroscopy analysis in partnership with the UGA Department of Physics. He also supervised undergraduate researcher Orlando Zeng on a spatial transcriptomics project. Luyang Fang continued advancing statistically grounded and uncertainty-aware AI methods, collaborating with computer scientists, biologists, educators, engineers, and public health researchers. She works closely with multiple groups at UGA and beyond, including the AI for STEM Education Center, Tianming Liu’s lab, the NewGen Psychometrics and Data Science Analytics Lab, the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development, and Guo-Cheng Yuan’s lab at Mount Sinai. Over the past year, she produced eight peer-reviewed publications (including accepted papers) and received several honors, including the James L. Carmon Scholarship and an ASA Early Career Travel Award. Since November of last year, Jiazhang Cai has focused on developing denoising algorithms for spatial transcriptomics data and a new model for learning cell–cell interactions in collaboration with Guo-Cheng Yuan at Mount Sinai. He published eleven papers, including major methodological contributions in spatial transcriptomics, several reviews on large language model research, and statistical support for clinical trials with the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. He received the 2025 Summer Research Grant and the Best Poster Award at the 2026 Georgia Statistical Day. In 2025, Tao Wang published a series of works bridging advanced machine learning with biomedical and scientific applications. His research includes a cover-featured Analyst article on transforming SERS spectra across instruments, the active learning method SPOT in Big Data Mining and Analytics, and a Quantitative Biology review on large language models in bioinformatics. He also contributed to efficient sparse fine-tuning methods for large language models, such as GASDU, illustrating his continued focus on scalable and practical AI methodology. Collaborative Efforts Our long-standing collaboration with Prof. Yiping Zhao’s group in the UGA Department of Physics continues to advance Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering–based virus detection. Partnerships with the Hong Lab at the University of Worcester are also progressing steadily. Publications Since November 2024, our lab has published twenty papers across machine learning, spatial transcriptomics, medical imaging, statistical methodology, and large language models. These include publications in premier venues such as ICCV and AAAI, articles in high-impact journals including Epidemiology & Infection and The Annals of Applied Statistics, and multiple preprints on emerging topics such as alignment, dataset distillation, and spatial transcriptomics algorithm development. This body of work reflects the group’s growing momentum in methodological innovation and interdisciplinary research. Lab Activities The group held its Spring 2025 retreat at Washington Farm, providing time for discussion, team-building, and planning for upcoming research directions. On April 29–30, Prof. Ma delivered a keynote lecture at the Healthcare & Life Sciences Working Group meeting at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, addressing emerging intersections of quantum computing, data science, and life sciences. In addition, our group attended the 2025 IBM Quantum Developer Conference in Atlanta, engaging with researchers from academia and industry on the latest developments in quantum algorithms, hardware, and applications. In Closing As we reflect on the year’s achievements and look ahead, the BDAL lab remains committed to advancing research, strengthening collaborations, and fostering academic excellence.
