I am an incoming student in the joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. program in Computational Biology (CPCB). Before that, I was a Master student in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at ETH Zürich, during which I visited Prof. Yun William Yu's lab for a research internship. I graduated with BEng in Computer Science and Engineering and BSc in Biological Sciences from Seoul National University and was fortunate to work with Prof. Martin Steinegger and Prof. Johannes Söding during my undergraduate years.

Generally, I am interested in building fast and efficient software for biological sequence analysis, particularly in the context of protein sequence comparison and metagenomic analysis.

Such general interest can be landed on specific techniques such as:

• Smart data structures / algorithms
• Careful subsampling / dimension reduction
• System engineering, parallelization, and optimization
• Tailored hardware acceleration

Apart from my academic journey, I have previously interned at Roche and Abiosciences Inc. I am keen on developing software that can be used in the real world and have a positive impact on society.

Conference and Poster Presentations

* Equal contribution

Petasearch: Efficient and Sensitive Sequence Comparison at Scale

Minghang Li^*, Milot Mirdita^*, Jonas Hügel, Johannes Söding, Martin Steinegger

ISMB-ECCB 2023 (talk), RECOMB 2022 (poster)

[code] [thesis]

Publications

Computational prediction of human genetic variants in the mouse genome

Kexin Dong, Samuel I. Gould, Minghang Li, Francisco J. Sánchez Rivera

Nature Biotechnology, Dec. 2025, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02925-0