Yuyang Deng · Genomics · Neuroscience
I'm a Computer Science & Biostatistics student at UNC Chapel Hill, working from the single-cell genome to the rhythms of the brain — following a single thread from the double helix to the waveform.
About
I'm Yuyang Deng — an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Biostatistics, with a minor in Data Science (expected May 2027).
My work lives at the seam between two scales of biology: the molecular instructions encoded in the genome, and the electrical choreography those instructions produce in the brain. Across labs at UNC and Duke, I build computational pipelines and machine-learning models that span single-cell epigenetics, neuroimaging-genetics, and the analysis of brain-wave dynamics.
Research focus
Single-cell transcription factors and the human genome — building data imputation and augmentation methods to overcome sparsity in large-scale single-cell data (UNC Lineberger, Jie Lab).
Modeling brain-wave activity in TR-PTSD and OCD — computing metrics like MESOR, entropy, and rhythmic amplitude on clinical trial data (Duke School of Medicine, Suthana Lab).
Experience
Lead a data imputation/augmentation pipeline to solve transcription-factor genome sparsity; compute large-scale ML models in Python/MATLAB/R for metrics such as t-SNE, BW, and UMI on single-cell data.
Neuroscientific research on TR-PTSD and OCD using biostatistical methods; brain-wave metrics (MESOR, entropy, rhythmic amplitude) via PyTorch/MATLAB/R; co-built a Unity VR program (C#) tracking OCD patients' eye-gaze distance.
Processed clinical MRI through MATLAB pipelines; ran parallel jobs (ANTs, AlphaFold3, TBSS) on 100,000+ patients (HABS-HD, MCSA, UK Biobank) for a multimodal neuroimaging-genetic study of Alzheimer's; Python backend for an LLM-powered ADRD Knowledge Graph.
Projects
UNC Infinite Brain Group — Verilog/RTL verification for chip testing pipelines, and led the web-dev team building the project site (NodeJS, Tailwind).
Python backend for an Alzheimer's knowledge graph that uses LLMs (OpenAI API) to update research datasets across health metadata.
Parallel pipelines (ANTs, AlphaFold3, TBSS) on the UNC Longleaf cluster across 100,000+ patient scans for multimodal analysis.
A Unity VR program in C# that tracks OCD patients' eye-gaze distance in real-life scenarios for clinical research.
Honors & awards
Contact
Open to collaborations, conversations, and questions at the intersection of genomics and neuroscience.