Jianhua Ruan

Dr. Jianhua Ruan is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), affiliated with the College of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis and has been a faculty member at UTSA since 2007. His research focuses on bioinformatics, computational systems biology, and machine learning applied to life sciences. Specific areas include modeling cis-regulatory networks, analyzing biological networks via graph algorithms, and biomarker discovery using omics data. Dr. Ruan collaborates extensively with biologists at UTSA and the UT Health Science Center on genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and epigenomic studies.

Key research interests include:

• Machine learning for cis-regulatory network modeling
• Graph algorithms for biological network analysis
• Integrated omics data analysis for disease prediction
• Epigenetic regulation and cancer biology

His work has been supported by NIH, NSF, and the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute. Notable achievements include a Best Performer award in the DREAM Reverse Engineering Challenges (2008) and the UTSA Faculty Research Award (2007).

Dr. Ruan organizes the UTSA Computer Science Graduate Research Seminar, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. He has developed software tools like TSCAN for single-cell RNA-seq analysis and contributes to computational methods for biomarker discovery and network-based classification.