Chengyao joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2026. After a BSc in Biotechnology at Sichuan University, she worked as a bioinformatician analysing large-scale omics data to resolve arthropod phylogenies. During her MSc in Life Science Informatics at the University of Bonn, she developed a strong interest in machine learning and built a gene prioritisation tool for rare disease diagnosis. She afterwards completed her PhD at the Delft Bioinformatics Lab, TU Delft, applying statistical and machine learning methods to analyse gut microbiome data in collaboration with DSM-Firmenich. During her PhD she also visited the Multi-omics Network Analytics Group at the Technical University of Denmark.

In the Zeller lab, Chengyao works on microbiome data analysis and infrastructure, contributing to research projects in the group and providing analysis support at the Center for Microbiome Analyses and Therapeutics (CMAT). Her main focus is building and maintaining standardised, reproducible pipelines for collecting, processing, analysing and modelling 16S and shotgun metagenomic data in the context of human disease. She is particularly interested in making cross-cohort microbiome analyses more reliable and in delineating hallmarks of dysbiosis that are shared across patient populations and diseases.