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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang

@elezzx.bsky.social
349 followers 614 following 63 posts

Postdoc @UPenn working with Drs. Brielin Brown, Bogdan Pasaniuc, and Michael Gandal. Statistical genetics, functional architecture, single cell data. zixuanzhang.github.io

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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Yun S. Song @yun-s-song.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Please help spread the word! We are recruiting multiple Postdoctoral Fellows as part of the recently launched Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative (BCBI) at UC Berkeley and UCSF. BCBI website: bcbi.berkeley.edu Apply by Nov 1, 2026: berkeley.infoready4.com#freeformComp... (1/n)
bcbi.berkeley.edu
Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative | Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Version 0.3 of jaxQTL is out! We dramatically sped up ACAT-based scans by 3-6x. CD4+ OneK1K chr22 takes ~1m, down from ~15m. This fix improved memory consumption as well. There are various other numerical improvements made and improved documentation. Check it out! mancusolab.github.io/jaxqtl/
mancusolab.github.io
jaxQTL - jaxQTL
Cell-type-specific eQTL mapping from single-cell pseudobulk expression.
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
v0.2.0 of jaxqtl is out! Now supports dosages, MAF filtering, and fixed a few bugs that could result in models not converging in rare cases. We're still actively developing and plan to get addition features (eg GxE, etc) integrated soon. github.com/mancusolab/j...
github.com
GitHub - mancusolab/jaxqtl: Flexible, scalable, QTL analyses using generalized linear models implemented in JAX
Flexible, scalable, QTL analyses using generalized linear models implemented in JAX - mancusolab/jaxqtl
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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang @elezzx.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
🧙‍♂️
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Hanbin Lee @epigenci.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
How should we apply linear mixed models to populations under stabilizing selection? The first paper I wrote with my grad school advisor is published in Genetics. academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... 1/n
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Genoio has a v0.2.0 release. Performance is better across the board, beating most other libraries or matching highly performance ones (but with a single interface in Python now). Check it out mancusolab.github.io/genoio/
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Jeff Spence @jeffspence.github.io · 22/06/2026
Excited to see @jonj-udd.bsky.social's fantastic work out @genetics-gsa.bsky.social. Selection in _heterozygotes_ is the primary force shaping allele frequencies of loss-of-function mutations in humans, even in genes only associated with purely recessive diseases. 🧪🧬 doi.org/10.1093/gene...
doi.org
Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes
Abstract. The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model pred
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
I wrote about AI in academia. "PhD-level thinking", LLM bias, grunt work, alignment, AGI, data center water use, AI politics -- something for everyone.
open.substack.com
Thoughts on AI in academia
PhD-level thinking, LLM bias, alignment, AGI, data centers, and AI politics
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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Super excited to see this out! Fantastic collaboration with Luke O'Connor and trainees Amber Shen and Xinran Wang. Thread with details will come soon, but linear ARG provide a HIGHLY efficient representation of genotype data that can be treated as a linear operator www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Thrilled to see this out. What started out as a chat several years back with @drfejzo.bsky.social about leveraging publicly available data on hyperemesis gravidarum GWAS turned into a wonderful collaboration with April Shu, @mvaudel.bsky.social, @xwww.bsky.social and many others! rdcu.be/fdl9k
rdcu.be
Multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of severe pregnancy nausea and vomiting
Nature Genetics - Multi-ancestry GWAS meta-analysis identifies risk loci for severe nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Downstream analyses explore maternal and fetal contributions of these loci and...
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Lior Pachter @lpachter.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
If you use dim. reduction, you may be interested in two recent preprints we've posted on contrastive PCA: The Rayleigh Quotient and Contrastive Principal Component Analysis I & II w/ Maria Carilli & Kayla Jackson. They cover a lot of ground from theory to practice. 1/🧵
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April Wei @aprilwei.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Very proud to share our new work on General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs (GRG). We topped ourselves in this one 🚀 and made GRG a practical foundation for biobank-scale population and statistical genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Arjun Bhattacharya @arjunbhattac.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Another preprint from our group @mdanderson.bsky.social led by talented postdoc @seantbres.bsky.social! Joint with @jonhuang.bsky.social, exploring the intersection of environmental toxins, maternal/fetal health, and placental txomics. Tweet thread below!
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
I used a combination of claude and codex, as well as the excellent base code from our jaxQTL project, to drive glmax. glmax is a jax-based GLM framework that is jit-compiled and end-to-end differentiable. It leverages implicit function theorem for improved autodiff. mancusolab.github.io/glmax/
mancusolab.github.io
glmax
Grammar-first generalized linear modeling in JAX.
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Josh Weinstock @joshweinstock.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Here's our R package for interacting with WGS derived GWAS summary statistics with many rare variants (from e.g. UKB or AofUs). It uses duckdb underneath so it's fast. Includes some helpful tie ins to Open Targets / Encode Screen / Ensembl APIs for annotation. weinstocklab.github.io/gwasplot/ind...
weinstocklab.github.io
High Performance GWAS Plotting And Annotation
More about what it does (maybe more than one line). Continuation lines should be indented.
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
I used my JAX-based skills for codex to port the excellent Python3 LDSC spec to JAX and Polars. My intent here was to stress test my JAX skill definitions and find how I could improve rules and contexts--NOT to develop a replacement github.com/mancusolab/j...
github.com
GitHub - mancusolab/jax_ldsc
Contribute to mancusolab/jax_ldsc development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Been trying my hand with agents with varying degrees of success and placed some definitions into a repo. Feel free to fork/pull-req for improvements. I want to get a skill in there to generate code -> latex (and vice versa) for validation soon. github.com/quattro/jax-...
github.com
GitHub - quattro/jax-numerics-agent
Contribute to quattro/jax-numerics-agent development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang @elezzx.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
hijack def adds fear of flying…very good show
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Zeyun Lu 鲁泽沄 @zeyunlu.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Happy to share our new preprint from @sashagusevposts.bsky.social and @nmancuso.bsky.social labs! We introduce Mr. PEG, a framework integrating perturbational screens, eQTL, and GWAS data to identify mediating genes for complex traits. (1/n) www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
medrxiv.org
Integrating perturbational screens, eQTL, and GWAS data identifies mediating genes for complex traits
Most current GWAS-eQTL approaches prioritize genes whose mediating effects on complex traits act through cis-regulation, while trans-acting genes remain largely underexplored. Recent perturbational sc...
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Hanbin Lee @epigenci.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We finally submitted the earlier preprint to a journal after massive restructuring. We've expanded the REML section for those interested in the method. We clarify that ARG-LMM estimates mutational variance and not additive variance.
biorxiv.org
Genetic prediction with ARG-powered linear algebra
Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are an attractive means for quantitative genetic analysis of complex traits because they encode the realized genetic relatedness between a sample of individuals i...
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Jeff Spence @jeffspence.github.io · 19/11/2025
@hakha.bsky.social and I wrote a Research Briefing (with a lay summary + "behind the scenes") of our paper on how genes are prioritized by GWAS and rare variant burden tests. 🧬🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
How do genetic association studies rank genes?
Genome-wide association studies and rare-variant burden tests reveal complementary aspects of trait biology.
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Looking forward to presenting our work on characterizing eqtl architecture across ancestors and cells tomorrow at the Evolgenome seminar! Huge thanks for the invite @lindakachuri.bsky.social
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Jeff Spence @jeffspence.github.io · 07/11/2025
How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Specificity, length and luck drive gene rankings in association studies - Nature
Genetic association tests prioritize candidate genes based on different criteria.
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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang @elezzx.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Very proud of you @tszfung.bsky.social for so many achievements!! 🎊
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Yuval Simons @yuvalsim.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Why do complex traits differ in their genetic architecture? In our new PLOS Biology paper, we will try to convince you that two simple scaling laws drive differences in the number, effect sizes and frequencies of causal variants affecting complex traits. Thread: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
journals.plos.org
Simple scaling laws control the genetic architectures of human complex traits
Genome-wide association studies have revealed that the genetic architectures of complex traits vary widely. This study shows that differences in architectures of highly polygenic traits arise mainly f...
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
5 YEARS of HGG Advances! Mike, Jessica, Sara, and so many others have done such a fantastic job in shaping and expanding the journal. Please consider submitting your work in genetics/genomics with us!
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Haky Im @hakyim.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
I'm hiring a computational biologist interested in complex trait genetics using deep learning approaches. Reach out to me, if interested.
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Yun S. Song @yun-s-song.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)
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Yun S. Song @yun-s-song.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online: doi.org/10.1038/s415... It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...
doi.org
Robust and accurate Bayesian inference of genome-wide genealogies for hundreds of genomes - Nature Genetics
SINGER is a method for creating ancestral recombination graphs to understand the genealogical history of genomes. The method has increased speed, and thus scalability, without sacrificing accuracy.
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Arun Durvasula @arundurvasula.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here: (I am usually too exhausted to post one)
medrxiv.org
Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores
Our understanding of the dependence of the genetic and environmental architecture of common diseases on age is incomplete. Here, we use longitudinal data to quantify age-dependent genetic and environm...
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Reposted by Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang
Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Please consider applying to be HGG new EiC! HGG is a fantastic avenue for publishing work in genetics and genomics, striving for fast turnaround and is committed to open access.
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The American Journal of Human Genetics @ajhgnews.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
📣Online NOW! 📄Estimation of demography and mutation rates from one million haploid genomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jgschraiber.bsky.social @jeffspence.github.io @docedge.bsky.social
cell.com
Estimation of demography and mutation rates from one million haploid genomes
Samples of millions of genomes provide substantial information about recent demography and mutation, but standard population-genetic methods make assumptions not met in these data. We introduce DR EVI...
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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang @elezzx.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Huge congrats Roshni! Couldn’t wait to see what comes next in the new role!!
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Hakhamanesh Mostafavi @hakha.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
I'm thrilled that my lab at NYU is now supported by an NIH MIRA grant! I'm looking to hire 1-2 senior lab members (outstanding postdoc candidates or experienced staff scientists) with expertise in computational or statistical methods in human genetics or genomics. Please share!
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Harold Pimentel @hjp.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Super proud of my first student, @jingyour.bsky.social! Well done! Looking forward to the amazing work you will do in the future 🥲 bsky.app/profile/jing...
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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Super excited to see this out. What started as some math in a grant in 2020, to a student deciding to take this on in 2022, to published in 2025. These things can take time and patience is key!
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Hanbin Lee @epigenci.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
My talk from this year's probgen is finally out. Where do linear mixed models and random effects come from? They emerge from *mutations* on Ancestral Recombination Graphs.
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Zixuan (Eleanor) Zhang @elezzx.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
Congrats on the first PhD work!! Very nicely done! @alnahid.bsky.social
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Molly Przeworski @mollyprz.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
New paper by Luke O'Connor @lukeoconnor.bsky.social and Guy Sella @gs2747.bsky.social
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Arnau Sebé-Pedrós @arnausebe.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
An insightful @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social perspective on our recent article about the early evolution of genome regulation in animals. www.cell.com/trends/genet... Thank you Omar and @ferdix.bsky.social!
cell.com
Animal origins: looping back in time
How did the chromatin folding mechanisms controlling gene regulation emerge during animal evolution? Kim et al. surveyed chromatin folding at high-resolution in unicellular relatives of animals as wel...
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Irene Gallego Romero @ee-reh-neh.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
🧪🖥️🧬 It's here!! Our second MPRA, which is totally different from the first. For starters, there's no human sequences anywhere! Instead there's marsupials, wolves, pandas and a lot of hard work from lab members past & present, chief amongst them @navya-shukla.bsky.social (looking for a postdoc btw)
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Jeff Spence @jeffspence.github.io · 11/07/2025
Very excited to see this out and delighted to have played a small part -- @courtsmithrun.bsky.social did a deep dive into the pleiotropy of the HLA locus and found tons of cool stuff, including lots of associations at the SNP, HLA allele, and haplotype levels.
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Jonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Staff scientist position (computational): I am looking for a computational scientist to join my genomics lab at Stanford. They should have an outstanding skillset in ML/statistical methods for genomic applications, postdoc experience and a strong publication record. #sciencejobs
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Bradley Harris @bradleyomics.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Delighted to share the first preprint of my postdoc in the @carlanderson.bsky.social lab www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...! 🚨 A super exciting study I co-led with the very talented @tobioinformatics.bsky.social . Stay tuned to see what we learned about genetic susceptibility to complex disease. 🧬🧵 1/
medrxiv.org
Cell-type-resolved genetic regulatory variation shapes inflammatory bowel disease risk
Most genetic variants associated with complex diseases lie in non-coding regions, complicating efforts to identify effector genes and relevant cell types. Here, we map cis-eQTLs across 2.2 million sin...
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Florian Privé @privefl.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
I probably won't have time to make a video out of this. But the materials are available online, and should be pretty self-explanatory. Hope this is useful to some people. privefl.github.io/statgen-cour...
privefl.github.io
Statistical Human Genetics course using R
Statistical Human Genetics course using R
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Jerome @jeromics.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Check out our new preprint on Lilace, a statistical tool for scoring FACS-based deep mutational scanning experiments! Lilace directly models the shift between variant fluorescence distributions and provides score uncertainty estimates to better assess reliability and reproducibility. (1/3)
biorxiv.org
Accurate variant effect estimation in FACS-based deep mutational scanning data with Lilace
Deep mutational scanning (DMS) experiments interrogate the effect of genetic variants on protein function, often using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to quantitatively measure molecular ph...
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Axel Visel @axelvisel.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
Textbooks: “Enhancers are just a bunch of TFBSs” But how do they REALLY work? New paper with many contributors here @berkeleylab.lbl.gov, @anshulkundaje.bsky.social, @anusri.bsky.social A 🧵 (1/n) Free access link: rdcu.be/erD22
A meme-style comic panel with three parts. Left: A stylized enhancer with a mutation, surrounded by colored blocks representing functional motifs, a neural network diagram, chromatin accessibility signal traces, and a sequence motif. Two cartoon mouse embryos below show different LacZ reporter activity patterns. Top right: A hand hovers anxiously between two red buttons labeled “Experiments” and “AI,” with the caption “HOW DO ENHANCERS REALLY WORK?” Bottom right: A sweating superhero wipes his forehead, looking stressed about the difficult choice.
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Hakhamanesh Mostafavi @hakha.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
It was fun writing this short piece on the omnigenic model. Sharing it here, though it's a painful time as my family, along with millions of others, is at risk in Iran and the region.
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Genome Biology and Evolution @genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Ferrari @jazlynmooney.bsky.social et al. find that while parameter scaling improves efficiency, strong scaling distorts diversity, intensifies background selection, and alters linkage patterns. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf097 #genome #evolution #bioinformatics
doi.org
Parameter Scaling in Population Genetics Simulations may Introduce Unintended Background Selection: Considerations for Scaled Simulation Design
Abstract. Scaling is a common practice in population genetic simulations to increase computational efficiency. However, few studies systematically examine
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Mashaal Sohail @mashaals.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
Our new work is now out in AJHG "Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples." Great collaboration with @delvecchyo.bsky.social and Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, led by Valeria Añorve-Garibay.
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