Ruizhe (Richard) Wang
Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.S. in Biology and Computer Science, expected May 2027 · GPA 3.86Research
Strahl Lab, Dept. of Biochemistry & Biophysics, UNC
Undergraduate Researcher, Mar 2024–present · PI: Brian D. StrahlSas5 YEATS domain and the SAS-I complex: Biology honors thesis
May 2025–present · Mentor: Christopher “Kit” Cummins- Expressed and GST-purified wild-type and F85A Sas5 and Taf14 YEATS domains.
- Designed and optimized histone peptide pulldowns across H3/H4 modifications and salt stringency.
- Designed a codon-optimized full-length SAS5 expression construct.
Experimental validation of AlphaFold 3–predicted histone-recognition proteins
With the Steven Jacobsen Lab, UCLA · Aug 2026–present- Leading bench validation of collaborator-generated AF3 predictions for yeast proteins binding methylated H3 tails (H3K4me3).
- Prioritized four candidates (Sir2, Hst1, Swi4, YPL245W).
RNA-seq workflow reproduction
Mar 2024–Apr 2025 · Mentor: Abid Khan- Reproduced a published SETD2-loss/hypoxia RNA-seq analysis (differential expression, pathway enrichment) as a reusable SLURM workflow on UNC’s Longleaf cluster.
UNITES Lab, UNC
CS Honors Thesis Researcher, Feb 2026–present · PI: Tianlong Chen; mentors Mufan Qiu, Ruichen Zhang; collaborator Yi Zhang (Duke University)- Image-to-gene prediction from histology at 8 µm on Visium HD colorectal cancer data.
- Built reproducible GPU pipelines to benchmark squared-error, flow-matching and (zero-inflated) negative-binomial models.
- Found model-selection and optimization confounds and set up controlled, patient-held-out validation.
Industry
AUSA Pharmed Co., Ltd., Shenzhen
Research Intern, Jun–Aug 2025- Clinical-trial support for CSPPT2 (N = 56,000): screening, biospecimen and biomarker collection, ECG, GCP data QC.
Jingke Biotechnology, Shenzhen
Research Intern, May–Jul 2024- DNA extraction and whole-exome sequencing; variant calling with BWA-MEM, GATK, bcftools.
Presentations & outputs
Poster
- Wang R, Cummins C, Strahl BD. “Defining the Role of the Sas5 YEATS Domain in Histone Acetylation and Chromatin-State Regulation.” 27th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research, UNC, Apr 2026.
Public research summary
- Wang R. “How Does Sas5 Recognize Histone Proteins?” UNC SURF, Carolina Digital Repository, Aug 2026. doi:10.17615/vt8g-1h07
Honors
UNC Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
2026Dean’s List, five semesters
2023–2026Skills
Bench
- Molecular cloning, PCR, yeast culture and transformation, recombinant protein expression, GST affinity purification, histone peptide pulldowns, SDS-PAGE, Western blotting.
Computational
- RNA-seq (STAR, DESeq2), spatial transcriptomics (Scanpy, AnnData), variant calling (BWA-MEM, GATK), PyTorch, probabilistic modeling, SLURM/HPC, Docker/Apptainer.
Programming
- Python, R, Bash, Perl, Java, C.
Languages
- Mandarin (native), English (fluent).