Biography

Elvis Han Cui is a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Hong Qian’s group at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, School of Science, Westlake University. He received his bachelor’s degree in Agriculture from Zhejiang University, followed by an M.S. in Biostatistics and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He previously worked in clinical drug development at the Department of Neurology, University of California, Irvine, and in the pharmaceutical industry. His research lies at the intersection of statistics, stochastic dynamics, and the life sciences, with interests in survival analysis and multistate models, optimal experimental design, single-cell data analysis, and molecular dynamics inference from fluorescence correlation spectroscopy.

Research Interests

Clinical trial design, Statistical learning, Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, Molecular dynamics

Academic Achievements

Elvis Han Cui has published first-author research in journals including Bioinformatics and Statistics and Computing. His representative contributions include co-developing the single-cell generalized trend model (scGTM) for interpretable modeling of gene expression along cell pseudotime and investigating swarm-based optimization methods for optimal experimental design in nonlinear mixed-effects models. He has also co-authored papers published at AAAI and ACM Multimedia on unseen object detection and few-shot class-incremental learning. His honors include UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship and the Irma Polaski Fellowship from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Representative Publications

1. Cui, E. H., Song, D., Wong, W. K., & Li, J. J. (2022). Single-cell generalized trend model (scGTM): A flexible and interpretable model of gene expression trend along cell pseudotime. Bioinformatics, 38(16), 3927–3934. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac423.

2. Cui, E. H., Zhang, Z., Chen, C. J., & Wong, W. K. (2024). Applications of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for tackling optimization problems across disciplines. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 9403. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-56670-6

3. Cui, E. H. (2026). The statistical compass [Monograph working manuscript]. arXiv:2606.11282.