minji

Hi, I'm Minji!

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University advised by Aaron Newman. My research focuses on decoding molecular biology data to discover the biological mechanisms underlying stem cells and to identify immature cell populations in cancer. Currently, I am developing machine learning models for inferring cell development potential from single-cell RNA-sequencing data. I am grateful to be supported by the Bio-X Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS).

Before Stanford, I received B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University advised by Jihong Kim and Sun Kim.

Outside of research, I love listening to music, playing the piano, taking photos, and drinking tea.

CV

Software

cytotrace2_logo

An interpretable deep learning model to predict absolute developmental potential using single-cell expression data (Nature Methods, 2025).

Website | Paper | Code | Star

Publications

*: equal contribution

Non-invasive profiling of the tumour microenvironment with spatial ecotypes
Wubing Zhang*, Erin L. Brown*, Abul Usmani*, Noah Earland, Minji Kang, Chibuzor Olelewe, Anushka Viswanathan, Pradeep S. Chauhan, Chloé B. Steen, Hyun Soo Jeon, Susanna Avagyan, Irfan Alahi, Nicholas P. Semenkovich, Janella C. Schwab, Chloe M. Sachs, Faridi Qaium, Peter K. Harris, Qingyuan Cai, Andrew J. Gentles, James Knight, Antonella Bacchiocchi, Peter C. Lucas, Ryan C. Fields, Mario Sznol, Ruth Halaban, David Y. Chen, Aadel A. Chaudhuri, Aaron M. Newman.
Nature, 2026

Improved reconstruction of single-cell developmental potential with CytoTRACE 2
Minji Kang*, Gunsagar S. Gulati*, Erin L. Brown*, Zhen Qi*, Susanna Avagyan, Jose Juan Almagro Armenteros, Rachel Gleyzer, Wubing Zhang, Chloé B. Steen, Jeremy Philip D’Silva, Janella Schwab, Michael F. Clarke, Aadel A. Chaudhuri, Aaron M. Newman.
Nature Methods, 2025

High-resolution alignment of single-cell and spatial transcriptomes with CytoSPACE
Milad R. Vahid*, Erin L. Brown*, Chloé B. Steen*, Wubing Zhang, Hyun Soo Jeon, Minji Kang, Andrew J. Gentles, Aaron M. Newman.
Nature Biotechnology, 2023

Deep hierarchical embedding for simultaneous modeling of GPCR proteins in a unified metric space
Taeheon Lee, Sangseon Lee, Minji Kang, Sun Kim.
Scientific Reports, 2021

Learning cell-type-specific gene regulation mechanism by multi-attention based deep learning model with regulatory latent space
Minji Kang*, Sangseon Lee*, Dohoon Lee, Sun Kim.
Frontiers in Genetics, 2020

A CNN-based encrypted data detection technique for ransomware defense
Minji Kang, Jonghoon Won, Jisung Park, Jihong Kim.
KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices, 2019 RansomBlocker: a low-overhead ransomware-proof SSD
Jisung Park, Youngdon Jung, Jonghoon Won, Minji Kang, Sungjin Lee, Jihong Kim.
In Proc. of the 56th Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2019



Contact

minji.kang [at] stanford [dot] edu

Newman Lab
G3101, Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building
265 Campus Drive, CA, 94305