Guang Shi

I am a Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin. I received my Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and have done postdoc studies at UT Austin and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research #

I combine polymer physics, statistical mechanics, and data-driven inference to understand how molecular information shapes the structure, dynamics, and material properties of chromosomes and biomolecular condensates.

The 4D genome. I developed HIPPS-DIMES, a maximum-entropy framework that reconstructs ensembles of three-dimensional chromosome structures from Hi-C or imaging data. I use the inferred interactions to connect chromosome organization with chromatin motion and local mechanical response, and collaborate on models linking simultaneous enhancer–promoter contacts to gene expression.

Biomolecular condensates. My polymer theories connect molecular sequence and interactions to phase behavior, internal organization, and fluidity. They describe how local clustering and fluctuating domains influence molecular diffusion and viscosity, providing a physical route from sequence to material properties.

Generative genome modeling (ongoing). I am developing models that generate chromosome ensembles from epigenomic and sequence features. In parallel, I am developing methods that combine population-level structural information with sparse single-cell contacts to infer individual cells’ chromatin organization.