Personal Introduction:

Dr. Haicang Zhang is a Professor and Principal Investigator of the AI Protein Design Laboratory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Previously, he served as an AI algorithm engineer at ByteDance Inc., a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University in the United States, and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on AI-driven protein design and drug design. He has developed the AI protein design platform “CarbonMatrix”, including CarbonDesign, CarbonNovo, AbX, and AbNovo. As the first or corresponding author, his major works have appeared in journals such as Nature Machine Intelligence (two papers in 2022 and 2024) and Nature Communications (2021), as well as at top AI conferences including NeuIPS (2023), ICML (two papers in 2024), and ICLR (2025). In 2022, he was selected for the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has led two nationally funded projects under the National Natural Science Foundation of China (General Program), one institute-level project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and one project under Shanghai’s AI Leap Plan.

Selected Publications:

1. H. Zhang, M. Xu, X. Fan, W. Chung, Y. Shen*. Predicting functional effect of missense variants using graph attention neural networks.Nature Machine Intelligence. 2022.https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00561-w

2. M. Ren, C. Yu, D. Bu*,H. Zhang*. Accurate and robust protein sequence design with CarbonDesign.Nature Machine Intelligence. 2024.https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00838-2

3. H. Qi#,H. Zhang#, Y. Zhao#, C. Chen#, J. Long, W. Chung, Y. Guan, Yufeng Shen*. MVP predicts the pathogenicity of missense variants by deep learning. Nature Communications. 2021.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20847-0

4. M. Ren, Z. He, andH. Zhang*. Multi-objective antibody design with constrained preference optimization. ICLR 2025.https://openreview.net/forum?id=4ktJJBvvUd

5. T. Zhu, M. Ren,H. Zhang*. Antibody Design Using a Score-based Diffusion Model Guided by Evolutionary, Physical and Geometric Constraints. ICML 2024.https://openreview.net/pdf?id=1YsQI04KaN

6. M. Ren, T. Zhu,H. Zhang*. CarbonNovo: Joint Design of Protein Structure and Sequence Using a Unified Energy-based Model. ICML 2024.https://openreview.net/pdf?id=FSxTEvuFa7

7. S. Liu#, T. Zhu#, M. Ren, C. Yu, D. Bu,H. Zhang*. Predicting mutational effects on protein-protein binding via a side-chain diffusion probabilistic model. NeuIPS 2023.https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/99088dffd5eab0babebcda4bc58bbcea-Paper-Conference.pdf