Saez-Rodriguez Group

Systems Biomedicine

Chang Lu

I studied biometrics identification at the Beijing University, a topic that gave rise to my interest in the application of computational methods to biological data. In my master studies at the Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab of Southwestern University, China I gained knowledge of machine learning and data mining and applied them to the prediction of protein function and noise functional annotations. In 2017, I crossed Eurasia to Maastricht, the Netherlands, to pursue my PhD in machine learning and statistic approaches for multi-omics and multimodal image data to analyze the mechanism of cardiometabolic diseases. Starting in October 2022, I continued my research path as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine (Saez-Rodriguez Group) at Heidelberg University, Germany, studying computational integration of cellular circuits and immune cell repertoires in spatial and temporal resolution.

Research Interests

I am interested in the design and application of computational strategies for spatial multi-omics data to study disease mechanisms in complex diseases. During my PhD, I analysed high-dimensional omics and imaging data of plaque and liver through a combination of computational strategies including statistical inference, machine learning and image processing, to dissect the pathogenesis of  cardiovascular and  liver diseases at the molecular, spatial and temporal level. Currently, I focus on the cellular circuit and immune cell repertoire integration at spatial and temporal resolution.

Professional Career

10/2022 – Present Postdoctoral researcher, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Germany
10/2017 – 09/2022 Research assistant, Department of Pathology, Maastricht University Medical Center+ (MUMC+), Maastricht, The Netherlands
09/2014 – 06/2017 Research assistant, Department of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

Education

10/2017 – 09/2022 PhD in Computational Biology, investigating cardiometabolic diseases at the Maastricht University Medical Center+ (MUMC+), Maastricht, The Netherlands
09/2014 – 06/2017 Master of Engineering in Computer Application Technology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China
09/2010 – 06/2014 Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Technology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China