Hanchuan Peng PhD

Hanchuan Peng joined the Allen Institute in 2012 to build a computational neuroanatomy and smart imaging group for the Institute's new initiatives in neural coding and cell types. His current research focuses on bioimage analysis, large-scale informatics, machine learning, as well as computational biology. Before joining the Allen Institute, Peng was the head of a computational bioimage analysis lab at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus. His recent work includes developing novel algorithms for 3-D+ image analysis and data mining, building single-neuron whole-brain level 3-D digital atlases for model animals, and Vaa3D (http://vaa3d.org), which is a high-performance visualization-assisted analysis system for large 3-D+ biological and biomedical-image datasets. He is also the inventor of the widely cited minimum-redundant maximum-relevance (mRMR) feature selection algorithm in machine learning.

Peng received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Southeast University, China. He held postdoctoral positions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley (computational biology, bioinformatics, and high-performance data mining with a particular focus on gene expression analysis) and at Johns Hopkins University Medical School (human brain imaging and analysis). He won several awards, including a Cozzarelli Prize (2013) for his collaborative research on dragonfly neurons, which "recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences (USA)".