Louxin Zhang is a Canadian

computational biologist Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and d ...

. He is currently a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the

National University of Singapore The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national university, national Public university, public research university in Singapore. It was officially established in 1980 by the merging of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University ...

. He is recognized for his contributions to combinatorial

semigroup theory In mathematics, a semigroup is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with an associative internal binary operation on it. The binary operation of a semigroup is most often denoted multiplicatively (just notation, not necessarily the ...

in mathematics. In addition, he is recognized for his work on the mathematical understanding of

phylogenetic trees A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA. In o ...

and networks, as well as the analysis of spaced seeds for sequence comparison in bioinformatics.

Early life

Louxin Zhang grew up in Luoyang, Henan, China. He graduated from

Lanzhou University Lanzhou University () is a public university in Lanzhou, Gansu, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. Founded in 1909, the ...

with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master's degree in mathematics. Then he proceeded to Canada to pursue a doctorate in computer science at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a thesis entitled "Emulations and Embeddings of Meshes of Trees and Hypercubes of Cliques.

Career

After postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Ming Li, Zhang began his independent research career in 1996 at the Institute of Systems Sciences (currently the Institute for Infocomm Research), where he was awarded a three-year Lee Kuan Yew Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1997. He introduced the string rewriting technique to investigate the word problem and the

conjugacy problem In abstract algebra, the conjugacy problem for a group ''G'' with a given presentation is the decision problem of determining, given two words ''x'' and ''y'' in ''G'', whether or not they represent conjugate elements of ''G''. That is, the probl ...

in special

monoids In abstract algebra, a monoid is a set equipped with an associative binary operation and an identity element. For example, the nonnegative integers with addition form a monoid, the identity element being . Monoids are semigroups with identity ...

. He discovered an elegant relationship between gene loss, gene duplication, and incomplete lineage sorting costs. Along with his colleagues, he developed the tree component decomposition method for studying phylogenetic networks. The technique yields a solution to an open problem regarding tree containment, the exact and asymptotic counting of the so-called tree-child networks, and a scalable method for inferring the minimum phylogeny. He also contributed to the theoretical knowledge of spaced seeds for sequence comparison and reconstruction of ancestral genome sequences.

Publications

* Zhang L. 1991. Conjugacy in special monoids. Journal of Algebra 143: 487-497. * Ma B, Li M, Zhang L. From gene trees to species trees. SIAM Journal on Computing 30:729-752. * Choi KP, Zeng F, Zhang L. Good spaced seeds for homology search. Bioinformatics 20:1053-1059. * * * * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zhang, Louxin Computational biologists Applied mathematicians National University of Singapore People from Luoyang Year of birth missing (living people) Living people