Title/Position
Assistant Professor

Degree
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022

zhonge(@cs.princeton.edu) (609) 258-9075 314 Computer Science



Research Areas: Computational Biology
Machine Learning

Short Bio

Ellen Zhong is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of AI and biology. Her research develops core machine learning techniques that are applied to computational and structural biology problems, with a particular focus on protein structure determination with cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Her Ph.D. work addressed a longstanding problem in reconstructing dynamic protein structures from cryo-EM images and introduced fundamental innovations in implicit neural representations for computer vision. She has interned at DeepMind with the AlphaFold team and previously worked on molecular dynamics algorithms and infrastructure at D. E. Shaw Research. She has given over 40 invited seminars on her work at the intersection of machine learning and biology. She co-founded and co-organizes the Machine Learning in Structural Biology workshop at NeurIPS.

Selected Publications

CryoDRGN2: Ab initio neural reconstruction of 3D protein structures from real cryo-EM images.
Zhong ED, Lerer A, Davis JH, Berger B.
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.

CryoDRGN: Reconstruction of heterogeneous cryo-EM structures using neural networks.
Zhong ED, Bepler T, Berger B, Davis JH.
Nature Methods, 2021. doi:10.1038/s41592-020-01049-4.

Learning the language of viral evolution and escape.
Hie B, Zhong ED, Berger B, Bryson B.
Science, 2021. doi:10.1126/science.abd7331.

Learning mutational semantics.
Hie B, Zhong ED, Bryson B, Berger B.
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS),2020.

Reconstructing continuous distributions of 3D protein structure from cryo-EM images.
Zhong ED, Bepler T, Davis JH, Berger B.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020. Spotlight presentation.