PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Guangchuang Yu

Also known as 余光创

Guangchuang Yu is a bioinformatics professor at Southern Medical University who builds R packages for omics data, including clusterProfiler, which now uses large language models to interpret enrichment results. After degrees in biotechnology and biochemistry, he worked as a bioinformatician at Jinan University, where he published GOSemSim in 2010 and clusterProfiler in 2012. During a PhD at the University of Hong Kong from 2013 to 2017 under Tommy Lam and Yi Guan, he published ChIPseeker and DOSE in 2015, and his ggtree package for phylogenetic trees appeared in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2017. Clarivate named him a Highly Cited Researcher each year from 2023 to 2025, and in December 2024 he coauthored a review of artificial intelligence across the life sciences. Today he is dean of the university's Department of Bioinformatics, which he has directed since 2021.

Timeline

  1. 2001–2009

    Biotechnology and biochemistry degrees

    He studies biotechnology at South China Agricultural University from 2001 to 2005. He then earns a master's degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at Anhui Medical University in 2009, with a thesis on new computational methods for analyzing miRNA target genes. From 2007 to 2009, he is also a visiting student at the Beijing Institute of Radiation Medicine.

  2. 2009–2013

    GOSemSim and clusterProfiler

    From 2009 to 2013, he works as a bioinformatician at Jinan University's Key Laboratory of Functional Protein Research of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes. In 2010, he publishes GOSemSim, an R package for measuring semantic similarity among GO terms and gene products, in Bioinformatics. His clusterProfiler package, built for comparing biological themes among gene clusters, first appears in OMICS in 2012.

  3. 2013–2017

    A PhD at the University of Hong Kong

    From 2013 to 2017, he earns a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health under Tommy Lam and Yi Guan, with a thesis on big-data computational methods for studying molecular evolution. In 2015, he publishes ChIPseeker, for ChIP peak annotation, and DOSE, for Disease Ontology semantic and enrichment analysis, in Bioinformatics.

  4. 2017–2023

    The ggtree package and book

    His ggtree package for visualizing and annotating phylogenetic trees with their covariates and other associated data appears in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in 2017. In November 2020, the journal selects the ggtree paper as its Volume 8 feature for its 10th anniversary. His book Data Integration, Manipulation and Visualization of Phylogenetic Trees, a guide to the tidytree, treeio, ggtree and ggtreeExtra packages, appears in the Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Biology Series with a 2023 copyright.

  5. 2017–2021

    Professor at Southern Medical University

    After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong's State Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases from 2017 to 2018, he joins Southern Medical University's School of Basic Medical Sciences as a professor in 2018. He becomes associate director of its Department of Bioinformatics in 2019 and director in 2021.

  6. 2020–2025

    Highly cited researcher lists

    Elsevier names him one of the 2020 Highly Cited Chinese Researchers in biomedical engineering. Clarivate lists him as a Highly Cited Researcher each year from 2023 to 2025.

  7. 2021–2024

    clusterProfiler 4.0 and Nature Protocols

    He and colleagues publish clusterProfiler 4.0 in The Innovation in 2021. In July 2024, his group's Nature Protocols paper shows how clusterProfiler can integrate metabolomics and metagenomics analyses, characterize transcription factors and annotate cells in single-cell studies. In December 2024, he coauthors the review "Artificial intelligence for life sciences: A comprehensive guide and future trends" in the journal Innovation Life.

  8. As of October 2026

    Dean of the bioinformatics department

    He is a professor and dean of the Department of Bioinformatics in Southern Medical University's School of Basic Medicine. His clusterProfiler package integrates large language model capabilities to interpret enrichment results automatically, and he serves on the standing committee of the Guangdong Health Information Network Association's generative AI branch for a 2025 to 2030 term.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Guangchuang Yu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Guangchuang Yu’s CV yulab-smu.top. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Biomedical Knowledge Mining Toolkit yulab-smu.top. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Using clusterProfiler to characterise Multi-Omics Data | Research Communities by Springer Nature communities.springernature.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. About the Author | Data Integration, Manipulation and Visualization of Phylogenetic Trees yulab-smu.top. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. 10th Anniversary Volume 8: Phylogenetic tree visualization with multivariate data – Methods Blog methodsblog.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Data Integration, Manipulation and Visualization of Phylogenetic Trees routledge.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Using clusterProfiler to characterize multiomics data | Nature Protocols nature.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Artificial intelligence for life sciences: A comprehensive guide and future trends - PolyU Scholars Hub research.polyu.edu.hk. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Bioconductor - clusterProfiler bioconductor.org. Checked 19 October 2026.