Zixuan Cang
Bio
I am an Assistant Professor in Mathematics at North Carolina State University. My research interests include topological and geometric data analysis, machine learning, and their applications to data-driven biology.
We are looking for motivated graduate students. Please contact me if you are interested.
Area(s) of Expertise
Mathematical and Computational Biology, Topological and Geometric Data Analysis
Publications
- Multiscale domain identification for spatial transcriptomics via persistent homology , Cell Reports Methods (2026)
- Reconstructing single-cell resolution from spatial transcriptomics with CellRefiner , Nature Communications (2026)
- OTMol: Robust Molecular Structure Comparison via Optimal Transport , Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (2025)
- Supervised Gromov–Wasserstein Optimal Transport with Metric-Preserving Constraints , SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (2025)
- Synchronized Optimal Transport for Joint Modeling of Dynamics Across Multiple Spaces , SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics (2025)
- LMNA-Related Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Single-Cell Transcriptomics during Patient-derived iPSC Differentiation Support Cell type and Lineage-specific Dysregulation of Gene Expression and Development for Cardiomyocytes and Epicardium-Derived Cells with Lamin A/C Haploinsufficiency , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2024)
- LMNA-Related Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Single-Cell Transcriptomics during Patient-Derived iPSC Differentiation Support Cell Type and Lineage-Specific Dysregulation of Gene Expression and Development for Cardiomyocytes and Epicardium-Derived Cells with Lamin A/C Haploinsufficiency , Cells (2024)
- Poisson-Boltzmann-based machine learning model for electrostatic analysis , Biophysical Journal (2024)
- Topological and geometric analysis of cell states in single-cell transcriptomic data , Briefings in Bioinformatics (2024)
- A mathematical method and software for spatially mapping intercellular communication , Nature Methods (2023)
Grants
Multicellular life forms, comprehensive collection of cells sharing the same genetic blueprint, follow robust developmental paths and achieve vast functions as a result of the complex interactions and heterogeneities of the cells. The emerging single-cell omics technologies have created a new lens enabling the dissection of the heterogeneity in biological systems at single-cell resolution and with high throughput. To extract insights from these complex and high-dimensional data resources, a fundamental task is to infer the low-dimensional underlying structures such as landscapes of cell states and developmental trajectories. Various approaches have been developed for this task and could lead to significantly different results and conclusions. There is a lack of robust and multiscale method to thoroughly examine the underlying structure with a spectrum of parameters and metrics. This proposal will use the emerging powerful topological and geometric data analysis to examine the space of all meaningful structures instead of deriving an individual structure. This project will develop a modern education plan for students in mathematical biology, where they are exposed to the advanced topological and geometric methods that are especially suitable for complex and high-dimensional biological data, to help them adapt to modern data-driven biology.