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