Short Biography

Dr. Zhiyong Lu joined the National Library of Medicine in 2007 after earning his Ph.D. and, in 2011 became the first NIH tenure-track Earl Stadtman Investigator in computational biology and health. He received early tenure in 2016 and have served as a Senior Investigator since then, leading research in artificial intelligence (AI), machine leaning, biomedical text and image processing, and information retrieval. In his role as Deputy Director for Literature Search at National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Dr. Lu oversees the overall R&D efforts to improve literature search and information access in resources like PubMed and LitCovid that are used by millions worldwide on a daily basis. Additionally, Dr. Lu holds an Adjunct Full Professor position with the Department of Computer Science and Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Dr. Lu is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). Dr. Lu currently serves on the US federal AI R&D inter-agency committee and NIH/IRP AI task force. Over the years, Dr. Lu has mentored over 90 trainees and is a highly cited author with 400 peer-review articles in leading scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Genetics, Nature Aging, PLoS Biology, etc. According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index of 90 with 50,000 citations. His many recent publications and invited talks generally have a focus on the following topics:

• AI & LLMs (e.g. GeneAgent, TrialGPT)
• Biomedial Literature Search (e.g. PubMed Best Match, LitCovid)
• NLP & Text Mining (e.g. PubTator, BioCreative, LitVar)
• Medical image processing (e.g. NIH Chest X-ray Dataset, DeepSeeNet)

Honors and Awards (selected)

• NIH Director's Award 2025
• NIH Clinical Center CEO Award 2025
• NLM Regents Award 2024
• NIH Director’s Challenge Innovation Award 2024
• The International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) Fellow 2023
• The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) Fellow 2019
• NIH Clinical Center CEO Award 2017
• NLM Special Act/Service Awards
• Highly Cited Researcher, Clarivate Analytics
• Challenge Awards: BioCreative, BioASQ, n2c2, OHNLP, CLEF, etc.

Awards by Our Trainees

• K99/R00 award 2025 - Qiao Jin
• K99/R00 award 2022 - Qingyu Chen (joined faculty at Yale)
• K99/R00 award 2019 - Yifan Peng (joined faculty at Cornell)
• AMIA 2024 High School Scholar - Daniel Li
• AMIA 2022 High School Scholar - Lilly Xu (Harvard, Class of 2027)
• NSF CISE Graduate Fellowship 2023 - Ashley Shin
• NIH Summer Mentor Award - Arm Elsawy, Qingyu Chen, Yifan Peng
• NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence - R. Khare, Y. Mao, C. Wei, etc.

Professional Services (selected)

• Associate Editor: Bioinformatics (OUP), JAMIA (OUP)
• Conference Co-Chair: ICHI 2019, BioCreative, etc.
• PC/AREA Co-Chair: ISMB, PSB
• Committee (NIH): Board of SD/CDs; Assembly of Scientists, NITRD AI, NLM Tenure, etc.
• Reviewer (grant proposal): NIH, NSF, MRC, NSERC, NWO, etc.
• Reviewer (journal): JAMA, Nature Methods/Medicine, Lancet DH, etc.
• Reviewer (conference): ISMB, PSB, AMIA, ACL, WWW, etc.

Invited/Keynote Talks (selected from 150+)

• The 12th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)
• NIH ODSS Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar
• The 20th ISCB Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference
• AstraZeneca, Roche, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.
• Columbia, Harvard, Mayo Clinic, UChicago, Penn, UIUC etc