Zhixiu received her PhD in Bioinformatics from Indiana University in 2015. During her PhD, her focus was on developing methods for de novo computational protein design and predicting effects of human genetic variants..

Currently, she is working as a research fellow in the lab of Professor Matthew Brown at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, QUT. Her research mainly focuses on identifying genetic susceptibility loci of ankylosing spondylitis (AS), fine mapping AS-associated variants and understanding the function of AS-associated loci.