Yingnan Gao

I completed my Ph.D. degree with a specialisation in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I studied the macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns in prokaryotes under the scope of pulsed evolution and the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology. My postdoctoral research at University of Washington focused on developing downstream phylogenetic analysis tools for tumour lineage tracing data. For my research at SAiGENCI, Adelaide University, I leverage methods and techniques from ecology and evolutionary biology (e.g., phylogenetics) to investigate tumour progression and the tumour immunolgical microenvironment using single-cell sequencing data. Tumour Immunology, Computational ecology and phylogenetics, Biostatistics, Bioinformatic methods development

[2025] Gao, Y., Abdullah, A., & Wu, M. (2025). The powerbend distribution provides a unified model for the species abundance distribution across animals, plants and microbes. NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 16(1), 9 pages. [2023] Gao, Y., & Wu, M. (2023). Accounting for 16S rRNA copy number prediction uncertainty and its implications in bacterial diversity analyses. ISME COMMUNICATIONS, 3(1), 9 pages. [2026] Mengyuan, S., Yingnan, G., Ning, L., Dharmesh, B., Michael, M., Juan, H., . . . Stefano, M. (2026). cellNexus: Quality control, annotation, aggregation and analytical layers for the Human Cell Atlas data. [2025] Gao, Y., & Feder, A. F. (2025). Detecting branching rate heterogeneity with tree balance statistics in lineage tracing trees.. [2024] Gao, Y., Abdullah, A., & Wu, M. (2024). A unifying