Zhan Lab
Welcome to the Zhan Lab at New Mexico Tech!
We build machine learning systems that connect large language models and foundational models with real-world scientific and societal challenges. Our work spans deep learning, structured reasoning, and human-AI interaction, with applications across genomics, medicine, robotics, and responsible AI.
New Mexico Tech – Institute Flag
🔬 Research Areas
🧬 Variant Effect Prediction using Large Language Models
We design LLMs to interpret genetic variants and predict disease relevance across cardiomyopathies and neurological disorders.🧠 Biomedical Knowledge Graphs & Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
Hybrid methods that combine neural models with structured biological knowledge.🔐 Privacy & Robustness in Genomic Models
Studying adversarial attacks, fairness, and model bias for real-world deployment.🤖 Agentic AI for Surgery and Rehab
AI systems that analyze and collaborate in clinical actions such as surgical skill tracking and robotic rehabilitation.
Recent News
- [Mar, 2025]. "A disease-specific language model for variant pathogenicity in cardiac and regulatory genomics" is published in Nature Machine Intelligence!
- [Mar, 2025]. Invited to serve as a reviewer for ACL-2025 and Nature Scientific Reports!
- [Jun, 2024]. Invited to serve as a PC member for AAAI-2025 and a reviewer for both Machine Learning and Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems!
- [Jan, 2024]. Invited to serve as a TPC member for IJCNN-2024, and a reviewer for ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction!
- [Oct, 2023]. Invited to serve as a PC member for AAAI-2024, SDM-2024, and ICKG-2023!
- [Aug, 2023]. "Simplex2vec Backward: From Vectors Back to Simplicial Complex" is accepted by CIKM-2023!
- [Jul, 2023]. Invited to serve as a PC member for IEEE-SMC 2023 and HICSS-2024, as well as a subreviewer for CIKM-2023!
- [Jul, 2023]. Start a new job as a Postdoctoral Scientist at Cedars-Sinai!
- [Apr, 2023]. Invited to serve as a PC member for IJCAI-2023!
- [Dec, 2022]. Received the AAAI-23 Student Scholarship!
- [Dec, 2022]. Invited to serve as a Program Committee (PC) member for KDD-2023 Research Track!
- [Dec, 2022]. "Measuring the Privacy Leakage via Graph Reconstruction Attacks on Simplicial Neural Networks" has been selected as one of the finalists!
- [Nov, 2022]. "Measuring the Privacy Leakage via Graph Reconstruction Attacks on Simplicial Neural Networks" is accepted by AAAI-2023 Student Abstract and Poster Program!
- [Nov, 2022]. "Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Text-Attributed Networks with Simplicial Complexes" is accepted by AAAI-2023 Doctoral Consortium!
- [Nov, 2022]. "Towards Fair and Selectively Privacy-Preserving Models Using Negative Multi-Task Learning" is accepted by AAAI-2023 Student Abstract and Poster Program!
📚 Featured Publications
 | A disease-specific language model for variant pathogenicity in cardiac and regulatory genomics |
