Jiayu Su

--- Navigating the multidimensional universe of systems biology ---

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I am a final-year PhD student in Systems Biology at Columbia University, advised by Raul Rabadan and David Knowles. My research focuses on developing statistical and computational methods to understand the complexities of human diseases from large-scale sequencing data. I am particularly interested in RNA biology and the applications of single-cell and spatial omics technologies. My most recent work (SPLISOSM, 2025) has uncovered a hidden layer of tissue regulation through spatially variable RNA processing in the brain and glioblastoma. Additionally, I also work on kernel-based statistical machine learning and subspace learning problems.

Previously, I received my Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Mathematics from Peking University, where I worked with Cheng Li on methods for single-cell data to study aging. I have also interned at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School and briefly worked as a bioinformatics engineer at a precision medicine startup during the pandemic.

Some other research directions I am excited about include:

Spatiotemporal tissue dynamics
The interaction between cancer cells and surrounding tissue affects immune response and treatment. Spatial multi-omics across samples and time may help unravel this complex ecosystem.
RNA in cancer therapy
Splicing dysregulation generates oncogenic isoforms and targetable neoantigens. Identifying these can open new therapeutic possibilities.
Aging
Aging involves molecular changes that can lead to cancer. Studying the link between RNA biology, aging, and cancer offers insights into prevention and treatment.

News

Oct 23, 2025 The SPLISOSM paper (A computational framework for mapping isoform landscape and regulatory mechanisms from spatial transcriptomics data) was accepted (in principle) at Nature Biotechnology!
Nov 01, 2024 The sisPCA paper (Disentangling Interpretable Factors with Supervised Independent Subspace Principal Component Analysis) was accepted at NeurIPS 2024!
Feb 04, 2024 New personal website is online!

Selected publications

† co-corresponding authors; * equal contribution;

  1. Mapping isoforms and regulatory mechanisms from spatial transcriptomics data with splisosm
    Jiayu Su†, Yiming Qu, Megan Schertzer, Haochen Yang, Jiahao Jiang, Tenzin Lhakhang, Theodore M Nelson, Stella Park, Qiliang Lai, Xi Fu, Seung-won Choi, David A Knowles†, Raul Rabadan†
    Nature Biotechnology (in press), 2025
    Link to paper Code Website
  2. Disentangling interpretable factors with supervised independent subspace principal component analysis
    Jiayu Su†, David A. Knowles†, Raul Rabadan†
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
    Link to paper Code Website
  3. Smoother: a unified and modular framework for incorporating structural dependency in spatial omics data
    Jiayu Su†, Jean-Baptiste Reynier, Xi Fu, Guojie Zhong, Jiahao Jiang, Rydberg Supo Escalante, Yiping Wang, Luis Aparicio, Benjamin Izar, David A Knowles, Raul Rabadan†
    Genome Biology, 2023
    Link to paper Code Website
  4. A transcriptome-based single-cell biological age model and resource for tissue-specific aging measures
    Shulin Mao*, Jiayu Su*, Longteng Wang, Xiaochen Bo, Cheng Li†, Hebing Chen†
    Genome Research, 2023
    Link to paper Code Website
  5. Single-cell transcriptome profiling reveals neutrophil heterogeneity in homeostasis and infection
    Xuemei Xie*, Qiang Shi*, Peng Wu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Hiroto Kambara, Jiayu Su, Hongbo Yu, Shin-Young Park, Rongxia Guo, Qian Ren, Sudong Zhang, Yuanfu Xu, Leslie E. Silberstein, Tao Cheng, Fengxia Ma†, Cheng Li†, Hongbo R. Luo†
    Nature Immunology, 2020
    Link to paper Code