Zizhen Yao

Zizhen Yao is an associate investigator in Allen Institute for Brain Science, where she leads the computational efforts in categorization of cell type diversities in mammalian brains using single cell genomics technologies. She is a key contributor to the BRAIN Initiative U19 grant entitled “A comprehensive whole-brain atlas of cell types in the mouse”, leading to multiple landmark manuscripts recently published on the Nature package on mouse whole brain cell type atlas studies.

Zizhen Yao received a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to joining the Allen Institute for Brain Science, she worked at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center developing computational techniques for analyzing high throughput epigenetic and transcriptomic data to study myogenesis and neurogenesis during normal development and in disease.