Professor Qi Zhao is a Principal Investigator and doctoral supervisor at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC). He directs the Tumor Micro-ecology Research Platform and specializes in gastrointestinal-cancer bioinformatics, with a focus on:

• Developing multi-omics algorithms and open-source software for large-scale tumor data
• Identifying genomic alterations and molecular subtypes in digestive-system cancers
• Mining gut-microbiome signatures that modulate therapy resistance

Dr. Zhao earned a B.S. in bioengineering (2005-2009) and a Ph.D. in bioinformatics (2011-2016). After a post-doctoral fellowship at SYSUCC (2016-2019), he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019 and to full Professor in 2025.

He has published more than 40 SCI papers, including Cancer Cell, JAMA Oncology, Nature Communications, Cell Reports Medicine and Nucleic Acids Research . He is the principal inventor on six granted patents, has registered three software copyrights, and has led or participated in several National Natural Science Foundation of China projects and the National Key R&D Program . His work has been recognized with the First Prize of the Chinese Medical Science & Technology Award, and he was selected for the Guangdong “Special Support Program” for top young talents.