Qianlu Feng

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Hee-Sun Han in the Department of Chemistry. My research spans honey bee neurobiology and breast cancer biology, combining experimental and computational method development. On the experimental side, I develop approaches for characterizing gene expression with high detection efficiency in the honey bee brain and human breast cancer cell lines using the spatial transcriptomics platform MERFISH (in submission!). On the computational side, I build interactive tools to accelerate the exploration and interpretation of these high-dimensional spatial datasets. This includes MilliMap (in submission!), an open-source desktop application that unifies spatial omics visualization and analysis in a single interactive canvas, and its embedded AI agent Millini, a fine-tuned large language model that translates natural language biological questions into reproducible analytical workflows. My goal is to bridge wet-lab biology and intelligent software so that complex omics data can be interrogated conversationally and visually, making discovery more accessible to biologists without programming expertise (also benefiting myself for the rest of my data analysis).