Zhiliang Bai

Zhiliang Bai is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with his professorship beginning in 2026. He leads the Bai Lab, which focuses on the spatial biology of cancer and aging by integrating spatial multi-omics technologies, RNA biology, digital pathology, and artificial intelligence. His research aims to decode how human tissues reorganize during disease progression, therapeutic response, and aging, particularly by transforming clinically archived pathology samples into spatially resolved molecular atlases. The lab develops microsystem engineering and biochemical innovations to enable high-resolution spatial profiling of human tissues, alongside AI-driven computational pipelines that integrate multi-omics data with histopathology and clinical records to uncover spatial regulators linked to patient outcomes. These insights are further explored using in vitro and in vivo models to enable mechanistic understanding, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic hypothesis generation. Zhiliang received his B.E. and Ph.D. from Tianjin University and conducted graduate and postdoctoral research at Yale University, where he developed microfluidic platforms, single-cell and spatial omics technologies, and investigated mechanisms of durable cancer immunotherapy. Their recent contributions to the field are exemplified by influential works such as "The technological landscape and applications of single-cell multi-omics", and "The type 2 cytokine Fc–IL-4 revitalizes exhausted CD8+ T cells against cancer".