📍 Dallas, TX · 🌐 cankun.me

I build software that helps biomedical researchers work with large datasets and AI: single-cell and spatial omics analysis, agent-driven research tools, and the secure cloud platforms underneath them.

I'm a Data Scientist II at UT Southwestern Medical Center (School of Public Health). Before that, I spent seven years at The Ohio State University, most recently leading the AI infrastructure team at the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology.

• AI agents for research — Conversational agents over biomedical knowledge bases, reusable agent skill libraries, and a multi-provider LLM gateway with usage tracking. Contributor to BioChatter (Nature Biotechnology 2025).
• Single-cell and spatial multi-omics — Bulk, single-cell, and spatial analysis for immuno-oncology, cardiac development, lung disease, and neurodegeneration studies, published in Circulation, European Heart Journal, and Immunity.
• Research software and databases — Web databases, servers, and packages used by outside groups, including ssREAD, scREAD, IRIS3, and DESSO-DB.
• Secure research computing — HIPAA-compliant AWS and Azure environments for clinical and multi-omics studies, including a multi-institution clinical trial dataset.

• A platform for the biomedical application of large language models — Nature Biotechnology 2025 doi

• Common and divergent cellular aetiologies underlying HLHS and HRHS — European Heart Journal 2025 doi
• Cell-free RNA signatures in maternal blood with fetal congenital heart disease — Circulation Research 2024 doi
• Identifying intratumoral microbes from the ORIEN dataset — Cancer Research Communications 2024 doi ^★
• Abnormal progenitor cell differentiation in hypoplastic right heart syndrome — Circulation 2024 doi
• Impaired human cardiac cell development due to NOTCH1 deficiency — Circulation Research 2023 doi ^★
• Microglia coordinate cellular interactions during spinal cord repair — Nature Communications 2022 doi
• NIH SenNet Consortium to map senescent cells throughout the human lifespan — Nature Aging 2022 doi

• ssREAD: A single-cell and spatial RNA-seq database for Alzheimer's disease — Nature Communications 2024 doi ^★
• scGNN: A novel graph neural network framework for single-cell RNA-Seq — Nature Communications 2021 doi
• IRIS3: Integrated cell-type-specific regulon inference server from scRNA-Seq — Nucleic Acids Research 2020 doi ^★
• scREAD: A single-cell RNA-Seq database for Alzheimer's disease — iScience 2020 doi ^★

_{^★ first or co-first author}