I am a research-track Assistant Professor of Nursing Data Science since 2024, affiliated with the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing’s Center for Data Science at Emory University.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Informatics at Laney Graduate School, Emory University, advised by Dr. Carl Yang in Emory Graph Mining Lab.

My research interests include Multimodal Biomedical AI, Large Language Models and Ontology & Knowledge Graph.
[Openings] I’m looking for motivated students/interns for research projects. Undergraduate/Master/PhD students are encouraged to reach out.

Latest News

• [Dec 2025]: I’m honored to receive the 2025-26 RISE Pilot Grant in Children’s Environmental Health from NIEHS CHARTER.
• [Oct 2025]: Two papers get accepted by BIBM’25, representing our exploration on applied machine learning for omics data. One milestone for the first student-lead regular (aka full-length) peer-reviewed conference paper from my lab.
• [Apr 2025]: Two papers get accepted by EMBC’25 for foundation model based cardiac arrest risk prediction.
• [Mar 2025]: Three papers get accepted by MedInfo’25. Congratulations to my RA, Katie Shao, for kicking off our exploration on LLM-based phenotype extraction from clinical narratives, and her first first-authored paper.
• [Nov 2024]: Many thanks to Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence Network for funding our AI.humanity project “Understanding Generative AI’s Impact to Users from Various Religious Background” under the Seed Grants program. [Jun 2025]: our pilot study has been accepted by KDD’25 SciSocLLM Workshop.
• [Mar 2024]: I’m honored to receive the MCBIOS Young Scientist Excellence Award (4th-place winner). Thanks the MCBIOS committee!
• [Mar 2024]: our survey on Domain Speciliazation of LLM is honorably mentioned by the 2024 Economic Report of the President from the White House (LinkIn post»)
• [Oct 2023]: our paper on multimodal learning has been accepted by Findings of EMNLP’23. This is a co-first author paper with Yongchen Qian. Yongchen was a undergrad at Emory and he contributed a lot to this project. It is always my pleasure to work with motivated students.
• [Spring 2023]: several papers get accepted in the warm spring😸 Two of them are my first-author papers– GT-D2G (concept map generation) by IEEE TKDE, and HiPrompt (biomedical knowledge fusion) by SIGIR’23. Others are joint works with my amazing collaborators– closed-book QG with Xiangjue Dong (question generation) by EACL, and Cellcano (cell type identification) with Wenjing Ma by Nature Communications.

Students Worked with Me

• [2025-now] Jason Li. Undergrad at Emory.
• [2024-now] Jasmine Zhou. Undergrad at Emory.
• [2024-now] Jonathan Wang. Undergrad at Emory.
• [2024-2025] Shuyue Jiang. M.S. of Data Science at Emory.
• [2024-now] Victor Li. Undergrad at Emory.
• [2024-2025] Katie Shao. Undergrad at Emory; first position: M.S. of Computer Science at Northwestern.
• [2024-2025] Tung Dinh Honors Undergrad at Emory (Thesis committee); first position: M.S. at CMU.
• [2024-2025] Simon Liu. Honors Undergrad at Emory (Thesis committee); first position: M.S. of Computational Data Science at CMU.
• [2022-2023] Yongchen Qian. Undergrad at Emory; first position: M.S. of Software Engineering at CMU.
• [2021-2023] Jacob Choi. Undergrad at Emory; first position: M.S. of Computer Science at USC.

Publications