About
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University. I generally focus on deep learning, generative AI, large language models and computer vision. I am very fortunate to have been working with Jure Leskovec, Emma Lundberg, Anshul Kundaje and Aaron Newman. Some of my already published work includes
- Graph machine learning (JODIE, GreaseLM, DRAGON, AutoPath)
- Understanding large language models (NumBERT)
- Common-sense reasoning (NumBERT, GreaseLM, DRAGON)
- Retrieval augmented models for knowledge-intensive tasks (GreaseLM, DRAGON)
- Foundation models (Foundation Models)
- AI in biomedicine (Virtual Cell)
I received my B.S. in computer science at UIUC in 2019. I did research with Jiawei Han on data mining and heterogenous graph representation learning.
Selected Publications

How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities and Opportunities
Charlotte Bunne*, Yusuf Roohani*, Yanay Rosen*, Ankit Gupta, Xikun Zhang, Marcel Roed, Theo Alexandrov, Mohammed AlQuraishi, Patricia Brennan, Daniel B. Burkhardt, Andrea Califano, Jonah Cool, Abby F. Dernburg, Kirsty Ewing, Emily B. Fox, Matthias Haury, Amy E. Herr, Eric Horvitz, Patrick D. Hsu, Viren Jain, Gregory R. Johnson, Thomas Kalil, David R. Kelley, Shana O. Kelley, Anna Kreshuk, Tim Mitchison, Stephani Otte, Jay Shendure, Nicholas J. Sofroniew, Fabian Theis, Christina V. Theodoris, Srigokul Upadhyayula, Marc Valer, Bo Wang, Eric Xing, Serena Yeung-Levy, Marinka Zitnik, Theofanis Karaletsos, Aviv Regev, Emma Lundberg, Jure Leskovec, Stephen R. Quake (*equal contribution)
Cell, Dec 2024
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Abstract
Bibtex


On the opportunities and risks of foundation models
Rishi Bommasani, …, Xikun Zhang, …, Percy Liang (116 authors)
arXiv 2021
PDF
Abstract
Bibtex
Website

Other Publications



Similarity Modeling on Heterogeneous Networks via Automatic Path Discovery
Carl Yang, Mengxiong Liu, Frank He, Xikun Zhang, Jian Peng, Jiawei Han
ECML-PKDD 2018
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Abstract
Bibtex
Code
Awards
- Stanford Data Science Scholar (2024): merit-based, 16 selected out of hundreds of applicants at Stanford
- UIUC Bronze Tablet (2019): highest undergraduate honor at UIUC, top 3% of graduates
Academic Services
- Top 5% teaching assistant across the Stanford computer science department during fall 2023 (Head TA in CS224W)
- Organizing a workshop "Tools for assembling the cell: Towards the era of cell structural bioinformatics" at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) 2024
- Invited talk at AWS AI Lab in April 2022 on the GreaseLM paper
- Conference reviewer for NeurIPS, AAAI, AACL-IJCNLP
- Journal reviewer for BMC Bioinformatics, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
- Workshop reviewer for ACL CSRR workshop, CIKM FedGraph workshop, AAAI-GCLR workshop, AAAI-UDM workshop