Zimu Yu

Zimu Yu

ML for Computational Biology | Protein Fitness Landscapes, Epistasis & Protein Engineering

About me πŸ‘‹

Hi, welcome to my page!

I’m Zimu Yu. I studied Statistics at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (ZUEL). My interest in research began with mathematics, particularly probability theory and mathematical statistics. When faced with a complex question, I enjoy reasoning through it step by step, breaking it into smaller pieces, and using mathematical and statistical thinking to understand how they fit together.

I did not start out knowing that I would work in computational biology. My interest in the field developed gradually through research, as I became increasingly interested in biological questions that could be studied with statistical and computational methods. I currently work as a research assistant with Prof. Haipeng Gong’s group at Tsinghua University, Prof. Yunxin Xu’s group at ZUEL, and Prof. Xiaobo Sun’s group at Emory University.

Most of my recent work has focused on protein fitness landscapes, mutation effect prediction, mutational epistasis, and single-cell omics. These projects have made me increasingly interested in using statistics and machine learning to study biological systems. I am especially interested in questions about how mutations affect protein function and how cellular heterogeneity can be studied using single-cell and multi-omics data.

I hope to pursue a Ph.D. and continue working on problems at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and computational biology. I enjoy using mathematical, statistical, and computational tools to tackle challenging problems in biology.

I am always happy to talk about related research. Please feel free to reach out by email.

Research interests

I am particularly interested in protein fitness landscapes, mutational epistasis, protein variant effect prediction, and protein engineering. More broadly, I am interested in statistical machine learning and AI for biological and scientific problems.

Recent updates

  • 2026 β€” Cerebra-Epistasis is under review at Nature Biotechnology.
  • 2026 β€” RADAR is under review at Bioinformatics.
  • 2026 β€” MetaAI is under review at Nature Microbiology.
  • 2025 β€” CAPE was accepted to NeurIPS 2025.