Yifei Zhang
Ph.D. Student, Department of Biostatistics
Yale School of Public Health
About
I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health, advised by Prof. Yize Zhao. My research focuses on statistical machine learning for multimodal neuroimaging and brain connectomics, with applications to Alzheimer's disease. I develop deep generative models that separate shared and modality-specific variation in structural and functional brain networks and can reconstruct one modality from the other. I also work on modeling disease progression from incomplete, largely cross-sectional biomarker data, and on multimodal normative models of healthy brain aging for identifying disease-related deviations.
Before Yale, I received an M.S. in Statistics and Operations Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I worked with Prof. Zhengwu Zhang, and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Liverpool.
Research Interests
- Deep generative models
- Normative modeling
- Disease progression modeling
- Multimodal neuroimaging
- Brain connectomics
News
- 2026.09Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
- 2025.04Successfully passed my Master's thesis defense. Many thanks to Prof. Zhengwu Zhang for his careful guidance.
- 2025.03Honored to have been admitted to the Yale Biostatistics Program and to join Prof. Yize Zhao's group.
- 2024.09Joined the School of Data Science and Society as a Graduate Teaching Assistant.
- 2024.07Honored to participate in the EPIC Summer Camp and Workshop.