About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Prior to this, I obtained my PhD degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2026 and master degree from Institute of Computing Technology (ICT, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in 2023, where I was advised by Prof. Shaohua Kevin Zhou. In 2020, I obtained my bachelor degree from USTC, majoring in Computer Science and Technology. I have had the privilege of collaborating with Prof. Peng Xiong, Prof. Yefeng Zheng.
My research centers on AI biology, aiming at understanding biomolecular structures and designing functional molecules, including:
- Molecular design and drug discovery
- Multimodal biological foundation model
- Structure and function prediction
I am always welcoming discussions and collaborative opportunities, please feel free to contact me via email. :)

News

05/2026: Honored to be awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the President Scholarship.
03/2026: Honored to be awarded as the Outstanding Graduate of USTC and Anhui Provincial Outstanding Graduate (Ph.D., Class of 2026).
01/2026: NC-Bench (bioRxiv, code) has been accepted by ICLR 2026.
08/2025: We release structRFM (bioRxiv, code), a structure-guided RNA foundation model for structural and functional inference.
07/2025: BPfold has been published in Nature Communications.
10/2024: We release BPfold (bioRxiv, code), an effective tool for RNA secondary structure prediction.

(#: equal contribution, *: corresponding author. Selected publications | Publication List | Google Scholar)

A fully open structure-guided RNA foundation model for robust structural and functional inference
Heqin Zhu, Ruifeng Li, Ao Chang, Haobin Chen, Feng Zhang, Fenghe Tang, Tong Ye, Xin Li, Yunjie Gu, Peng Xiong*, Shaohua Kevin Zhou* [code][PyPI]

NC-Bench and NCfold for RNA non-canonical base pair prediction
Heqin Zhu#, Ruifeng Li#, Ao Chang, Mingqian Li, Hongyang Chen*, Peng Xiong*, Shaohua Kevin Zhou* [code][page][poster]
Deep generalizable prediction of RNA secondary structure via base pair motif energy
Heqin Zhu, Fenghe Tang, Quan Quan, Ke Chen, Peng Xiong*, Shaohua Kevin Zhou* [code][PyPI][poster][poster2]

UOD: universal oneshot detection of anatomical landmark (Early Accept)
Heqin Zhu, Quan Quan, Qingsong Yao, Zaiyi Liu, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code][poster]
Learning to localize cross-anatomy landmarks in x-ray images with a universal model
Heqin Zhu, Qingsong Yao, Li Xiao, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]
You Only Learn Once: Universal Anatomical Landmark Detection
Heqin Zhu, Qingsong Yao, Li Xiao, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]

Which images to label for few-shot medical image analysis?
Quan Quan#, Qingsong Yao#, Heqin Zhu, Qiyuan Wang, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]
IGU-Aug: Information-guided unsupervised augmentation and pixel-wise contrastive learning for medical image analysis
Quan Quan#, Qingsong Yao#, Heqin Zhu, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]
Slide-SAM: medical SAM meets sliding window
Quan Quan#, Fenghe Tang#, Zikang Xu, Heqin Zhu, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]
Hyspark: Hybrid sparse masking for large scale medical image pre-training
Fenghe Tang, Ronghao Xu, Qingsong Yao, Xueming Fu, Quan Quan, Heqin Zhu, Zaiyi Liu, Shaohua Kevin Zhou [code]

2026, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the President Scholarship, CAS. (中科院院长奖)
2026, Provincial Outstanding Graduate (Ph.D., Class of 2026), Anhui Province. (安徽省优秀毕业生)
2026, Outstanding Graduate (Ph.D., Class of 2026), USTC. (中国科大优秀毕业生)
2025, National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, Chinese Ministry of Education. (国家奖学金)
2025, Suzhou Industrial Park Scholarship, USTC.
2020-2025, Graduate Academic Scholarship, UCAS & ICT & USTC.
2023, Merit Student Award, UCAS & ICT
2018-2019, Outstanding Student Award, USTC
2017, Institute of Chemistry Excellence Scholarship, USTC

09/2023 - 06/2026, Ph.D. of Biomedical Engineering, Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Suzhou, China
09/2020 - 06/2023, Master of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) & Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), CAS, Beijing, China
09/2016 - 06/2020, Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China
- Hua Xia Talent Program in Computer Science and Technology

Journal Reviewers
- TCSVT: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Conference Reviewers
- MICCAI: International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention
- Neurips: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Teaching Assistants
- Spring 2024, Teaching Assistant: Biomolecular structure prediction and modeling, USTC
- Fall 2023, Teaching Assistant: Electronic information openness practices, USTC
Volunteer Experiences
- 2024, Volunteer: Medical Augmented Reality Summer School, Suzhou
- 2023, Volunteer: Dushu Lake Forum Dushu Lake Symposium on Medical lmage Computing, Suzhou

Multimodal AI for RNA modeling and foundation model. PDF
- 06/15/2026, virtual, MSD R&D China Innovation Collaboration Center (MCICC)
- 12/2025, Suzhou, China, USTC Course on Digital Healthcare Technology and Applications
Structure-guided RNA foundation model for structure and function prediction. PDF
- 06/13/2026, Hefei, China, The 7th USTC Academic Forum for Engineering Graduate Students & the “Dechuang · Jingjian Innovation” Doctoral Academic Forum. Outstanding Academic Presentation Award, 1st of 10. (中国科学技术大学第七届工程类研究生学术论坛暨“德创·精尖创新”博士生学术论坛)
Deep generalizable prediction of RNA secondary structure via base pair motif energy. PDF
- 05/2025, Changchun, China, The 3rd National Conference on Biomolecular Structure Prediction and Simulation. Outstanding Academic Presentation Award, 2nd of 12. (第三届全国生物分子结构预测与模拟学术会议)