Hi, I’m Bo Li, a Ph.D. student at the University of Macau, supervised by Prof. Bob Zhang. My research is co-supported by Prof. Qianqian Song from the University of Florida, where I collaborate on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of AI Virtual Cell.
My research interests focus on AI Virtual Cell & Phenotypic Drug Discovery & Cell Painting. Recently, I am focusing on:
(1) Modeling virtual cells with generative models;
(2) Building large foundation models in virtual cell tasks.
🔥 News
- 2025: 🎉🎉 happy everyday
📝 Selected Publications

PhenoProfiler: Advancing Morphology Representations for Image-based Drug Discovery
Bo Li, Bob Zhang, …, Qianqian Song
Under review in Nature Communications (Major Revision)
Abstract: Achieving end-to-end cell image encoding for the first time in Image-based Phenotypic Drug Discovery tasks, with performance comparable to non-end-to-end encoding while reducing inference time by approximately 40 times.

SpaIM: Single-cell Spatial Transcriptomics Imputation via Style Transfer
Bo Li, Ziyang Tang, …, Qianqian Song
Nature Communications 2025 (In Press)
Abstract: Predicting unmeasured gene expression in spatial transcriptomics (ST) using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in cross-modal imputation based on style transfer concepts.

Gene Expression Prediction from Histology Images via Hypergraph Neural Networks
Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Qianqian Song
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2024
Abstract: Constructing a hypergraph via Euclidean distance and adjacent position weighting to exploit local correlations in cell images, enabling gene expression prediction for cells in Whole Slide Image (WSI) pathology images.

Multi-scale Hypergraph-based Feature Alignment Network for Cell Localization
Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin
Pattern Recognition 2024
Abstract: Rethinking the cell localization task from the perspective of feature alignment for the first time and proposing a multi-scale hypergraph module that significantly improves accuracy by adaptively aggregating multi-level features.

Exponential Distance Transform Maps for Cell Localization
Bo Li, Jie Chen, …, and Hong Bu
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2024
Abstract: To address the challenge of existing density maps losing cell location information in dense regions, a new exponential distance transform map is proposed to provide accurate cell location information with reasonable gradients.

Lite-UNet: A Lightweight and Efficient Network for Cell Localization
Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2024
Abstract: A lightweight and efficient cell localization model called Lite-UNet is proposed for quickly and accurately localizing cells in images to further improve the efficiency of computer-aided medicine.

Hypergraph Association Weakly Supervised Crowd Counting
Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications 2023
Abstract: A novel hypergraph association module is proposed to solve the problem of uneven distribution of crowd density by encoding higher-order associations among features, which opens a new direction to solve this problem.
📖 Educations
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2024.08 – Present: University of Macau
- Ph.D. candidate of Computer Science, Full Scholarship, Supervisors: Prof. Bob Zhang, Prof. Qianqian Song
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2021.09 - 2024.07: Beijing University of Technology
- Master of Electronic Information, Supervisors: Prof. Yong Zhang, Prof. Baocai Yin
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2017.09 - 2021.07: Beijing Information Science & Technology University
- Bachelor of Robotics Engineering, Supervisors: Prof. Hongbo Huang
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2024.07: Top 100 Graduates of BJUT (Top 100/6331)
- 2024.07 & 2021.07: Excellent Graduate of Beijing
- 2023.10: Xiaomi Scholarship
- 2023.10 & 2022.10:The First Prize Scholarship
- 2022.10: National Scholarship
- 2020.12: The Second Prize of National Mathematics Competition
💻 Work Experiences
- 2022.05 – 2023.06: Algorithm Intern: Biomedical Image Analysis, West China Hospital.
💼 Services
Reviewer: Science Advances, Briefings in Bioinformatics, BMC Biology, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IET Image Processing.
🌍 Visitor Map



