AI for Healthcare: From Machine Learning Methods to Real-World Biomedical Impact
I am a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, UTHealth Houston, and Associate Director of the Center for Secure Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare.
My research group develops human-centered AI and machine learning methods for real-world healthcare challenges, with current focus areas in disease progression modeling, counterfactual inference, biomedical graph learning, large language models for scientific discovery, and AI-guided therapeutic antibody design.
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We are recruiting highly motivated Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.
Latest News
- April 2026 Our team’s study on vaccination and Alzheimer’s was featured in Viva Longevity channel
- May 2026 Invited to talk at PEGS 2026 about AI-based antibody design
- Sep 2025 Dr. Kim was promoted to Tenured Associate Professor!
- Aug 2025 Top Five performers in AIntibody Challenge organized by IQVIA Laboratories with 166 participants from academia, biotech, pharma, and big tech companies.
- Jan 2025 Gave a tutorial on “AI-guided Antibody Discovery” at PepTalk 2025, San Diego
- Dec 2024: So honored to be featured in UTHealth Insider news.
- Oct 2024: Awarded NIH Research Project Grant R01 as PI ($3.9M for five years) for data-driven disease subtyping for Alzheimer’s disease.
- Oct 2024: Gave a talk, “AI for Computational Phenotyping and Predicting Accelerated Aging,” at UTHealth Houston Neuroscience Research Center and Aging Research Symposium.
- Jan 2024: Gave a talk “AI/ML to Identify Personalized Treatment Effect from Data” at the Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine and Healthcare Workshop by McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, UTHealth Houston.
- Nov 2023: Awarded NIH Research Project Grant R01 as PI ($4M for five years) on federated learning for multiple clinical data.
- Aug 2023: Our work, CancerGPT, was invited for a talk at PathAI.
- May 2023: Gave an invited talk at The Web Conference 2023 Health Day.
- Mar 2023: Gave an invited talk at BERD Core, UTHealth McGovern Medical School, and Data Science Core at SBMI.
- Mar 2023: Honored to serve as a grant review panelist for United Kingdom Research and Innovation.
- Nov 2022: Served as a grant review panelist for AI in Healthcare (Fonds de recherche du Québec & Ministry of Innovation, Science & Technology - Israel).
- Nov 2022: Gave a talk at AI in Health Conference, organized by Rice Ken Kennedy Institute.
- Sep 2022: Our vaccine and Alzheimer’s study was invited to testify before the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
- Jan 2021: Top 10% most cited PLoS One article in 2016 paper.
- Jul 2020: Selected as an AAIC 2020 Highlighted Poster.
- Jul 2020: Our team’s vaccine and Alzheimer’s study was covered by NPR, CNN, and ScienceDaily.
- Apr 2020: Ranked 2nd in the International DREAM Challenge for Drug Repurposing.
- Jan 2020: Served as a grant review panelist for Luxembourg National Science Foundation.
- Nov 2020: Gave a talk at AI in Health Conference, organized by Rice Ken Kennedy Institute.
- Sep 2019: Initiated the SBMI Datathon Series as an organizer.
- Sep 2019: Awarded Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Data 4 Action grant as PI.