Zhiliang Bai

Zhiliang obtained a B.E. in Measuring and Control Technology in 2015 and a Ph.D. in Instrument Science and Technology in 2021, both from Tianjin University. As a visiting graduate student in Dr. Rong Fan’s laboratory at Yale University, he developed microfluidic devices for active single-cell sequencing and established single-cell pipelines to characterize CAR T cells. He subsequently continued as a postdoctoral scholar in the same lab, co-advised by Dr. Mina Xu in Yale Pathology, where he investigated the mechanistic basis of durable cancer immunotherapy and led the development of multiple spatial omics technologies. Zhiliang will join the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT as an Assistant Professor in early 2026, where his lab integrates spatial multi-omics innovation with RNA biology, digital pathology, and AI to advance cancer and aging research.

The biology of human tissues underlies how cells interact, adapt, and change over time. In cancer and aging, this biology becomes profoundly disrupted: tissues lose their organized architecture, immune regulation falters, and RNA regulatory networks shift. These changes drive disease initiation, progression, and therapeutic resistance. Yet, directly decoding tissue biology has remained challenging, especially in the clinical context, where the richest archives of patient samples have been historically inaccessible to advanced molecular profiling.

Our group develops and applies technologies to bridge this gap. We (1) combine microsystem engineering and biochemical innovation to advance spatial multi-omics technologies and apply them to clinically archived human tissues, transforming decades of pathology samples into spatially resolved molecular atlases; (2) build AI-driven computational pipelines to integrate multi-omics data with histopathology and clinical records, enabling the computation of quantitative indicators and the discovery of spatially enriched regulators linked to patient outcomes; and (3) use in vitro and in vivo systems to model these pathways, allowing deep mechanistic studies, biomarker discovery, therapeutic hypothesis generation, and the development of new treatment strategies.

We bring together technology development, clinical translation, and therapeutic design into a unified framework. In the face of unforeseen challenges, our multifaceted approach ensures we can pivot, adapt, and continue pushing the boundaries of spatial omics and cancer and aging biology.