• I have joined the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology as an Associate Editor.  (April, 2008)
• I will be an invited speaker at The First Scientific Meeting of Global Cassava Partnership, July 21-25, 2008.  (Febuary, 2008)
• I will be an invited speaker at Gordon Conference on Salt & Water Stress in Plants, Sept. 7-12, 2008.  (November, 2007)
  
• I have received a grant from the Alzheimer's Association, a nonprofit organization, for our research on developing computational systems biology approaches to analyzing gene expression, modeling transcriptome, and identifying genetic risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer's disease, a leading dementia in aging population. (June, 2007)
  
• I have joined the editorial board of the international journal of Artificial Intellignece, the primary journal for the field of artificial intelligence.  (Dec. 2006)
  
• I have given an invited talk on Data mining methods for modeling gene expression regulation and their applications at The 2006 IEEE Intern. Conf. on Data Mining.  (Dec. 2006)
  
• The MaxPlan planner developed by the Washington University Team - Zhao Xing, Yixin Chen and Weixiong Zhang - won the First Place Prize for the Optimal Planning Track of the 5th International Planning Competition at the 16th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2006.  (July, 2006)
  

Education:

• Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
• B.S. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Research Interests:

• Computational molecular and systems biology (machine learning/datamining methods for feature extraction, selection and classification as well as their applications to molecular biology - e.g., cis-element identification, gene identification and selection, non-coding small RNAs and their regulatory functions, gene regulatory networks, stress tolerance and regulation in plants, cancer, neurodegenerative and immune diseases, and haplotype inference)

• Artificial Intelligence (heuristic search, phase transitions in complex systems, planning and scheduling, constraint satisfaction and optimization, resource allocation in multi-agent systems and sensor networks)

• Combinatorial optimization (e.g., Traveling Salesman and Boolean satisfiability) and search algorithms

Contact Information:

Email: zhang AT cse DOT wustl DOT edu
Phone: (314)935-8788; Fax: (314)935-7302
Office: Jolley Hall, Room 506

Mailing Address:

Department of Computer Science
Washington University
Campus Box 1045
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899