Chaoran Cheng is a fourth-year CS Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is advised by Dr. Ge Liu, before which he was working with Prof. Jian Peng. His research interests mainly span multiple aspects of generative modeling in AI4Science domains, with a special interest in manifold learning in which desirable network behaviors are mathematically inspired and guaranteed. Combining continuous and discrete modalities with a more comprehensive and versatile generative model for molecules and proteins, their work can build a more comprehensive and versatile generative model and has been successfully applied to various AI4Science tasks including protein sequence-structure co-design and structure-based drug design.
He is actively working on one of the NSF-MMLI projects in Thrust 1, one of MMLI’s flagship CS+Chemistry collaborative effort to develop a machine learning-based platform for molecular design. He is also a part of the CABBI initiative, a multi-institutional project to deal with the emergent challenges of sustainable bioproducts.
He obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Peking University, before which he also spent his freshman year studying chemistry.