Principal Investigator
Zhiyong Lu, PhD FACMI FIAHSI

Short Biography
Dr. Zhiyong Lu is a Senior Investigator at the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Intramural Research Program, leading research in biomedical text and image processing, information retrieval, and AI/machine learning. 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. Dr. Lu is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). Over the years, Dr. Lu has mentored over 60 trainees and is a highly cited author with over 350 peer-review articles in leading scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, PLoS Biology, etc. According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index ~75 with 30,000+ citations. His many recent publications and invited talks generally have a focus on the following topics:
- Biomedial Literature Search (e.g. PubMed Best Match, LitCovid)
- AI & LLMs (e.g. GeneGPT, TrialGPT)
- NLP & Text Mining (e.g. PubTator, BioCreative, LitVar)
- Medical image processing (e.g. NIH Chest X-ray Dataset, DeepSeeNet)
Honors and Awards (selected)
- 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
- NSF CISE Graduate Fellowship 2023 - Ashley Shin
- AMIA 2022 High School Scholar - Lilly Xu (Harvard, Class of 2027)
- K99/R00 award 2022 - Qingyu Chen (joined faculty at Yale)
- K99/R00 award 2019 - Yifan Peng (joined faculty at Cornell)
- 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), JHIR
- Editorial Board: Database, JAMIA
- Conference Co-Chair: ICHI 2019, BioCreative, etc.
- PC/AREA Co-Chair: ISMB, PSB
- Committee: ISCB EDI
- Committee (NIH): 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)
- 2023 NIH ODSS Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar
- 2022 The 20th ISCB Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference
- 2021 SciNLP - Natural Language Processing for Scientific Text
- 2020 Human Impacts of AI Symposium AAAS STPF
- 2019 Harvard Medical School