Juannan Zhou

Juannan Zhou is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida, where they recently established their research lab. Their work focuses on genotype-phenotype mapping using machine learning, mathematical modeling, and wet lab experiments to understand evolutionary dynamics.

• Research Lab: Department of Biology, University of Florida
• Contact: juannanzhou@ufl.edu

Key research themes include:

• Mapping genotype-phenotype relationships in diploid organisms
• Investigating protein fitness landscapes through unsupervised language models
• Developing machine-learning assisted directed evolution techniques
• Studying complex probability distributions over biological sequence spaces
• Exploring interactions between biochemical constraints and evolutionary outcomes

Recent publications demonstrate technical innovations in:

• Gaussian process priors for sequence-function modeling
• Field-theoretic density estimation methods
• Higher-order epistasis analysis
• Nonparametric Bayesian approaches to biological sequence space
• Differentiable Smith-Waterman algorithms for sequence alignment

The lab actively seeks postdocs, lab technicians, and graduate students interested in machine learning applications in population genetics and evolutionary modeling. Current projects include developing gpmap-tools for genotype-phenotype map visualization and implementing empirical variance component regression frameworks.