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.
[//]: # - July 2024: Collaborative work on Subclonal Reconstruction using CliPP is now on bioRxiv. - May. 2025: Honored to receive the IMS FSML Travel Award. Will be presenting our work on transfer learning for TP53 mutation annotation. - Feb. 2025: Our paper Anderson Accelerated Operator Splitting Methods for Convex-nonconvex Regularized Problems is now on arXiv. - 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!
[//]: # - Oct. 2023: Our DeMixSC paper on bulk RNA-seq deconvolution is now on bioRxiv.
[//]: # - Sept. 2023: Our paper A Convex-Nonconvex Strategy for Grouped Variable Selection was accepted by Electronic Journal of Statistics (EJS).
[//]: # - Apr. 2023: Our paper on 1-bit matrix completion is now on arXiv.
[//]: # - Mar. 2023: Our L2E paper was selected to present at The 65th Annual Fall Technical Conference in Oct. 2023. [//]: # - Feb. 2023: Joint work with Stefan Wild and Kwassi Joseph Dzahini on zeroth-order optimization won the Best Poster Prize at 2023 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering!
[//]: #- Jan. 2023: I won the UF Statistics 2023 Winter Workshop Travel Award and will be presenting a work on 1-bit matrix completion.