Graduate Student
Department of Data Science, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Qinyu Xu received her B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Duke Kunshan University. She is currently a master student in Computational Biology and Quantitative Genetics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests focus on cancer biology, particularly on understanding how changes in gene expression drive cancer cell-state changes and disease progression. She is interested in using mathematical modeling and deep learning to investigate these underlying molecular mechanisms. During her undergraduate studies, she developed physics-informed neural network (PINN) frameworks to infer parameters in PDE-based tumor growth models and evaluated their robustness using both simulated and experimental data. She also analyzed single-cell RNA-seq datasets from pancreatic cancer to characterize tumor heterogeneity. At DFCI, she will continue to explore how continuous cellular trajectories can be reconstructed from sparse spatial transcriptomic snapshots, with the goal of understanding how gene expression and cellular states evolve over time and how cell–cell interactions and the tissue microenvironment shape these transitions.

Curriculum Vitae

Personal Information

Education

Scientific Career