Yunan Luo

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Georgia Institute of Technology since January 2022. I received my PhD in 2021 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Jian Peng. Prior to that, I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Yao Class at Tsinghua University in 2016.

I am broadly interested in computational biology and machine learning, with a focus on developing AI and data science methods to reveal core scientific insights into biology and medicine. Recent interests include machine learning, geometric deep learning, generative AI, large language models, network and system biology, functional genomics, cancer genomics, drug repositioning and discovery, and AI-guided protein engineering. I have received the NSF CAREER Award and NIH MIRA (R35) Award. I served as the PC co-chair for ACM-BCB 2025 and currently serve as PC co-chair for ACM-BCB 2026 and as a program committee member for RECOMB and ISMB.

Recent News

• [2025/12] SPURS paper published in Nature Communications.
• [2025/12] We have been invited to present our work at the CAGI7 Conference.
• [2025/11] Serving on the Publication Committee of International Society for Computational Biology.
• [2025/08] My group is part of the NSF AI Institute: Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI 2.0).
• [2025/07] We received the NSF CAREER Award!
• [2024/12] Two papers accepted by RECOMB 2025.
• [2024/07] MODIFY paper published in Nature Communications.
• [2023/12] Our paper on contrastive fitness learning accpeted by RECOMB 2024.
• [2023/11] KDBNet paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence.
• [2023/09] Received an Azure grant from Microsoft’s Accelerating Foundation Models Research Initiative.
• [2023/09] We received the NIH MIRA award!
• [2023/04] We received the Amazon Research Award.
• [2023/04] One paper on network alignment accepted to ISMB 2023.
• [2023/03] Our enzyme function prediction paper published at Science!

Selected Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, 2025
• NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) (R35 for ESI), 2023
• Amazon Research Award, 2022

Teaching

• CSE7850/CX4803, Machine Learning for Computational Biology: S26, S25, S24, S23, S22
• CSE8803 MLG, Machine Learning with Graphs: F25, F23