BMI Team Welcomes New Faculty Member Yonghui Wu, Ph.D.

The Department of Health Outcomes & Policy (HOP) welcomes Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., who joins the biomedical informatics (BMI) team as an assistant professor this semester.

Wu comes to UF from the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center (UT Health) at Houston, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow (2010-2014), research scientist (2014-2015) and research assistant professor (2016-2017). His research focuses on clinical natural language processing, machine learning and data mining.

Wu’s currently funded research projects include serving as co-principal investigator of a National Library of Medicine (NLM) grant to develop interactive machine-learning methods to process clinical text stored in electronic health records (EHR) systems. These methods can enable more accurate data-extraction from clinical documents and facilitate clinical research that relies on EHR data. Hua Xu, Ph.D., Robert H. Graham Professor in Entrepreneurial Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering and director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at UT Health, is the principal investigator of the NLM grant. Wu has already published several journal articles about his research on this project, including “A long journey to short abbreviations: developing an open-source framework for clinical abbreviation recognition and disambiguation (CARD)” in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Another of Wu’s research projects is supported by a Rising Star Award from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas, which funds early-stage investigators who have demonstrated promise for continued and enhanced contributions to the field of cancer research. Wu is investigating the use of electronic health records for repurposing existing drugs for cancer treatment.

Wu earned a Ph.D. in computer application technology at Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China, in 2010 before moving to Nashville, Tennessee for a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University.