About

I’m currently an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) at the University of Florida College of Medicine. I am hired at HOBI as part of UF’s AI Initiative. Prior to that, I completed my postdoctoral research with Dr. Fei Wang and Dr. Jyotishman Pathak in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University. I received my BSc degree in biomedical engineering, MSc and PhD degrees in circuits and systems from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 2012, 2015 and 2018, respectively. Besides, I studied at University of Texas at Arlington and University of Pittsburgh as a joint doctoral student in computer science department from 2016 to 2018.

Research Interests

• Machine Learning: Federated Learning, Metric Learning, Differential Privacy
• Health Informatics:
  • Feature engineering for better analytics with big medical data (EHR, claims…)
  • Predictive modeling • Disease progression modeling • Disease subtyping
  • Drug repurposing • Mitigating algorithmic bias in healthcare
  • Broadening eligibility criteria of clinical trial
• Computer Vision: Image Super-resolution, Pattern Recognition, Video Analysis

Currently, my primary research interest is data analytic, privacy preserving technology and their applications in health informatics. One key aspect I have been working on is evaluating the clinical similarity between pairwise patients according to their historical EHR in federated environment. Besides this, I also work on the privacy preserving technology like differential privacy in order to further protect patient’s information. Another major research topic that I am working on is to identify the potential sub-phenotypes of Alzheimer’s disease and use machine learning models to predict the future incidence of AD using administrative EHR in individuals.