Rate My Professor Guanghua Xiao

Guanghua Xiao, Ph.D., holds the Mary Dees McDermott Hicks Chair in Medical Science and serves as Professor in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. School of Public Health, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is also Director of the Quantitative Biomedical Research Center and leads the Health Data Sciences Ph.D. program. Xiao received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2006, along with an M.S. in Materials Science in the same year from Tsinghua University in 2000 and a B.S. in Materials Science from Tsinghua University in 1997. His academic career at UT Southwestern began in 2006 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences (now Population and Data Sciences), where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012 with tenure and to full Professor in 2019. He advanced from Associate Professor in Bioinformatics from 2015 to 2019.

Xiao's research focuses on artificial intelligence and deep learning, deep learning in image analysis, spatial molecular profiling, statistical methods in spatial and image analysis, machine learning, spatial statistics, and high-dimensional data analysis. His laboratory develops user-friendly software, computational algorithms, and bioinformatics tools for genomic and imaging data analysis, including AI methods for pathology imaging analysis, tumor region detection, cell spatial organization, and patient outcome prediction from big data. He serves as principal investigator or multiple principal investigator on grants from the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Key publications include "Akt-mediated regulation of autophagy and tumorigenesis through Beclin 1 phosphorylation" (Science, 2012), "Cell-free formation of RNA granules: bound RNAs identify features and components of cellular assemblies" (Cell, 2012), "The origin of hepatocellular carcinoma depends on metabolic zonation" (Science, 2026), "3D reconstruction of spatial transcriptomics with spatial pattern enhanced graph convolutional neural network" (Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2026), and "A deep learning model for clinical outcome prediction using longitudinal inpatient electronic health records" (JAMIA Open, 2025). His research has been cited over 19,000 times. Honors include Delta Omega National Society Pi Chapter (2006), Merck Doctoral Fellowship (2005), New Student Scholarship (2004) from the University of Minnesota Division of Biostatistics, and various distinctions from Tsinghua University (1997).