About me

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside. I am also a faculty member of the UCR Graduate Program in Genetics, Genomics & Bioinformatics. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, working with Dr. Wenyi Wang from 2022 to 2024. I received my Ph.D. in Statistics from North Carolina State University in 2022, advised by Dr. Eric C. Chi (now at Rice University).

My research interests broadly lie in statistical machine learning, computational statistics & optimization, and their applications in bioinformatics & cancer biology. Some key words of my research: penalization methods, structure recovery, robust estimation, majorization-minimization principle, high-dimensional data analysis, genetic variant annotation, transcriptome deconvolution, tumor heterogeneity and evolution.

I am actively looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students to work on 1) method and algorithm development in statistics and machine learning and/or 2) applications in cancer biology. Please feel free to send me an email with your CV if you are interested.

News

• Nov. 2024: Our DeMixSC paper was accepted by Genome Research!
• Oct. 2024: Our paper on 1-bit matrix completion was accepted by JCGS!
• July 2024: Xiaoqian joined UCR Department of Statistics as a tenure-track Assistant Professor starting from July 1st, 2024.
• Nov. 2023: Our DeMixSC work won the Best Poster Award at The 2023 Leading Edge of Cancer Research Symposium!