Hou Lab

PosterRahul Jasthi presented “ARSMA: An Advanced RNA Motif Structural Analysis Platform” at the SLU Institute for Drug and Biotherapeutic Innovation (SLU-IDBI) Annual Research Symposium (September 18). Photo & details.

FundingDr. Hou received a new NSF EAGER award, “Collaborative Research: EAGER: Unveiling Security Risks to Scientific Integrity in AI-Driven Biological Discovery” (Award 2628291). The project maps how externally sourced datasets, reference databases, and pretrained models enter AI-driven biological workflows, and measures how integrity failures in those resources propagate to scientific conclusions. See Grants.

FundingDr. Hou (co-PI) and Dr. Si Chen (PI, School of Planning, Design and Construction) received an MSU AI Ready Spartans Innovation Grant for “Urban AI: AI-Driven Decision Support for Real-World Urban Challenges” — a 20-hour online, non-credit learning experience open to MSU students from all majors. Course page.

PosterUndergraduate researchers Rahul Jasthi, Vivek Shenoy, Ahmed Bektic, and Ellen Nguyen presented “AutoRNA: Incorporating a Fully Automated AI Agent into Various Advanced RNA Structural Analyses” at the Sigma Xi 2026 Research Symposium at Saint Louis University (March 30). AutoRNA is now part of the ARSMA platform with the full CoSSMos workflow and a structured multi-agent governance loop. Photo & details.

Lab newsDr. Hou joined the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering (CMSE) at Michigan State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. The Hou Lab is now based in East Lansing and is recruiting.

PosterUndergraduate researcher Rahul Jasthi presented “AutoRNA: Advancing RNA motif structural analysis with a fully automated AI agent” (with Ramez Mosad, Burhan Khan, Vivek Shenoy, Brent M. Znosko, and Jie Hou) at the 2025 ACS Midwest Regional Meeting (October 14), supported by an SSE Undergraduate Research Travel Award. Photo & details.

FundingDr. Hou (co-I) received a three-year NIH/NIGMS grant, “Understanding the Thermodynamics and Structure of RNA Secondary Structure Motifs” (PI: Dr. Brent Znosko). Project 2R15GM085699-05.

PromotionDr. Hou was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Saint Louis University, effective July 1, 2025.

AbstractOur warfarin work, “Improving Warfarin Therapy Safety with Accurate International Normalized Ratio (INR) Prediction Algorithms,” was accepted for poster presentation at the 33rd Congress of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH 2025). Acceptance letter.

FundingDr. Hou (PI) received a one-year SLU SURGE grant to develop AI agents and LLMs for automated RNA structural analysis and modeling (details).

PublicationHonored to co-author the ACM SIGCSE 2025 tutorial “Teaching Coding in the Age of AI” at the largest CS-education conference. Full paper · Workshop materials.

FundingDr. Hou (PI) received a six-semester grant from the SLU Foundational Interdisciplinary Research Experience (FIRE) program to involve undergraduates in building an AI agent for automated RNA structural analysis with large language models.

FundingDr. Hou (co-PI) received a two-year NSF grant, “CC* Compute-Campus: Modernizing Campus Cyberinfrastructure for AI-Enhanced Research and Education (ModernCARE)” (2430236).

FundingDr. Hou (PI) received a three-year NIH/NIGMS grant, “Improving Artificial Intelligence Readiness of RNA Motif Data for Structure Analysis and Modeling” (1R15GM155891-01).

Paper“Exploring the efficiency of deep graph neural networks for RNA secondary structure prediction” was accepted for oral presentation at ICIBM 2024 and recommended for journal submission. Congratulations to the team!

FundingDr. Hou (co-I) received a subaward on a four-year NIH/NHLBI R01 to develop machine-learning methods for pharmacogenetic refinement of the warfarin dose (PI: Dr. Brian Gage, WUSTL; 1R01HL173734-01).

FundingSLU SURGE funding received to support an undergraduate student working on RNA structure analysis during the 2024–2025 academic year.

AwardDr. Hou received the SSE Faculty and Staff Excellence in Teaching Award from the School of Science and Engineering at SLU.

AppointmentDr. Hou accepted a secondary appointment in the Department of Health and Clinical Outcomes Research (HCOR), SLU School of Medicine.

StudentsCongratulations to Omkar Datta Sowri Vullaganti and Vinay Chaudhari, both accepted to the Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium Student Research Experience Program with travel support and stipends.

StudentsVinay Chaudhari joined the lab as a graduate research assistant. Welcome!

AlumniCongratulations to Charlz Nithin Jerold (SLU BCB) on accepting a full-time position as Bioinformatics Research Analyst at Washington University in St. Louis.

TalkDr. Hou gave a guest lecture at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis, on machine-learning applications in healthcare.

StudentsAbdur Rahman Syed Ali (BCB) joined the lab. Welcome!

TalkDr. Hou spoke at the 2023 AI for Medicine conference on AI and big-data analytics in healthcare data.

TalkDr. Hou presented “The applications of deep learning techniques in protein structure prediction” at the 2023 SLU Computer Science Colloquium.

TalkDr. Hou presented our full paper on AnglesRefine (Transformer-based refinement of 3D protein structures using torsion angles) at the BioKDD workshop, ACM SIGKDD 2023, Long Beach.

ServiceDr. Hou began serving as Curriculum Committee Chair of the SLU School of Science and Engineering.

ServiceDr. Hou began serving as workshop co-chair of BioKDD 2023.

TalkMahdi Rahbar presented our full paper on deep graph learning for ranking protein structure predictions at ACM-BCB 2022.

PosterDr. Hou presented a poster on deep-learning-based ranking of protein–protein complexes at ISMB 2022.

Paper“Deep graph learning to estimate protein model quality using structural constraints from multiple sequence alignments” was accepted at ACM-BCB 2022; an abstract on ranking protein–protein complexes was accepted at ISMB 2022.

FundingSLU President's Research Fund award (co-PI) for privacy analysis of distributed learning with a defensive measure (05/2022 – 04/2023).

ServiceDr. Hou served as a judge at the SLU GSA Research Symposium and as a moderator at the SLU Sigma Xi Symposium.

FundingWUSTL ICTS/CTRFP award (co-PI) to develop machine-learning algorithms for pharmacogenetic refinement of warfarin dose (03/2022 – 02/2023).

FundingSLU President's Research Fund award (PI) to develop deep-learning algorithms for protein structure prediction (05/2021 – 11/2022).

Lab newsThe Hou Lab started in the SLU Department of Computer Science and the Bioinformatics & Computational Biology program.

CASP13Dr. Hou's protein quality-assessment approach was ranked No. 1 in ranking protein structural models in the 13th world-wide CASP competition.