Zhe He, iSchool at Florida State University

Zhe He, PhD, FIAHSI, FAMIA

Director, Institute for Successful Longevity

Professor, School of Information, Florida State University

Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science, Florida State University

Adjunct Professor, Department of Behavioral Science and Social Medicine, Florida State University

Adjunct Professor, Department of Statistics, Florida State University

Fellow, the International Academy of Health Science Informatics

Fellow, American Medical Informatics Association

Chair, AMIA Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group

[NCBI Bibliography] [Google Scholar] [DBLP] [ResearchGate] [PubMed] [arXiv]

Biography

I am a tenured Full Professor in the School of Information (iSchool) and Director of the Institute for Successful Longevity at Florida State University. My research lies at the intersection of biomedical and health informatics and information science, with the core expertise of machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, and human-centered AI. I am also Co-Director of the Biostatistics, Informatics, and Research Design Program (BIRD) for the UF-FSU Clinical and Translational Science Award. I currently serve as Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group. I am an elected fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). I'm honored to receive the 2022 Lois Lunin Award from the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) and the 2026 Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award from Florida State University.

At FSU, I direct the eHealth Lab. My research program centers on the design and evaluation of artificial intelligence–driven health technologies that support patients, caregivers, and clinicians, particularly older adults and underserved populations. I have substantial experience leading multidisciplinary teams with researchers in informatics, psychology, medicine, public health, computer science, sociology, gerontology, and industry partners. As a principal investigator, I have been continuously funded by HHS agencies since 2019, featuring an R01 grant and an R21 grant funded by National Institute on Aging, an R21 grant funded by the National Library of Medicine, an R21/R33 grant funded by National Institute of Mental Health, and another R21/R33 grant funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Qualtiy (AHRQ). As Co-I, I have been funded by NIAAA, NIGMS, NIDA, VHA, etc. In addition, I have also received pilot grant awards from the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Eli Lilly and Company, Amazon, NVIDIA, FSU CRC, and the Institute for Successful Longevity. In the NIA-funded R01 project “Adherence Promotion with Person-Centered Technology (APPT)”, we developed machine learning methods to predict adherence to cognitive training and lapses among older adults. We have also conducted a randomized controlled trial of a just-in-time smart reminder system to promote adherence to tablet-based gamified cognitive training, and another RCT on the JITAI reminder system for a mobile-based cognitive assessment program among older adults. In the AHRQ-funded R21/R33 project, I'm leading a team to design and develop LabGenie, a genAI–powered patient-facing application that helps older adults understand laboratory results and prepare for clinical visits. In my NIA-funded R21 project, I led the development of ctGATE, an informatics toolkit for assessing clinical trial generalizability, and a suite of informatics methods to optimize clinical trial eligibility criteria. Across these projects, I have developed and evaluated customized AI algorithms and informatics tools that are deployable in real-world healthcare or community settings.

I received a B.S. from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) in 2007, an M.S. from Columbia University in 2009, and a Ph.D. from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2014, all in Computer Science. During my PhD, I worked with Dr. James Geller and Dr. Yehoshua Perl in the Structural Analysis of Biomedical Ontologies Center (SABOC). My doctoral work was focused on developing quality assurance methods for biomedical ontologies, including the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), SNOMED CT, and application ontologies in BioPortal. Before joining FSU, I was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, under Dr. Chunhua Weng as my PI. I received an early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure at FSU in 2020. During my sabbatical in 2023-2024, I visited the National Library of Medicine as a Guest Researcher, where I studied large language models for health applications. I was promoted to Full Professor in 2025.

I have published over 140 papers in leading biomedical informatics venues, including JAMIA, JBI, Nature Communications, npj Digital Medicine, JMIR, and AMIA. My papers received prestigious recognitions including (1) two Distinguished Paper Awards of AMIA 2015 and AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium (AMIA 2015 paper and AMIA 2017 paper), (2) 2nd Place Best Student Paper Award of AMIA 2019 Annual Symposium, (2) paper selection in "AMIA 2014 Informatics Year In Review" (AMIA 2013 paper), (3) finalists of the Student Paper Award of AMIA 2015 Summit on Clinical Research Informatics and MEDINFO 2015, and (4) paper selection in "Clinical Research Informatics 2016 Year in Review" (JBI 2016 and AMIA 2015 paper)

I have been actively serving the biomedical informatics research community as an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), PLOS ONE, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, BMC Digital Health, Social Science Computer Review, and an Associate Editor of Smart Health (Elsevier) and Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research (JHIR). I'm a regular reviewer for over 50 mainstream journals, including Nature Medicine, NEJM AI, Lancet Digital Health, npj Digital Medicine, JAMIA, JBI, and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, among many others. I also serve on grant review panels for the NIH, VHA, AHRQ, NSF, and other funding agencies and private foundations in the US and other countries (Italy, Switzerland, Canada, ...).

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Clinical Trial Generalizability
Biomedical Ontologies and Controlled Vocabularies
Patient-Facing eHealth and AI Tools
Health Information Behavior

Selected Publications

Large Language Models

Qiao Jin, Zhizheng Wang, Yifan Yang, Qingqing Zhu, Donald Wright, Thomas Huang, Nikhil Khandekar, Nicholas Wan, Xuguang Ai, W John Wilbur, Zhe He, Andrew Taylor, Qingyu Chen, and Zhiyong Lu. AgentMD: Empowering language agents for risk prediction with large-scale clinical tool learning. Nature Communications. 16: 9377. 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-64430-x [Link]

Balu Bhasuran, Qiao Jin, Yuzhang Xie, Carl Yang, Karim Hanna, Jennifer Costa, Cindy Shavor, Zhiyong Lu, Zhe He. Preliminary analysis of the impact of lab results on large language model generated differential diagnoses. npj Digital Medicine (A Nature partner journal). 8, 166 (2025). [Link]

Xiaoyu Wang, Haoyong Ouyang, Balu Bhasuran, Xiao Luo, Karim Hanna, Mia Liza A. Lustria, Carl Yang, Zhe He. Lab-AI: Using Retrieval Augmentation to Enhance Language Models for Personalized Lab Test Interpretation in Clinical Medicine. The 13th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2025), Calabria, Italy, June 18-21, 2025. [Link]

Zhe He, Balu Bhasuran, Qiao Jin, Shubo Tian, Karim Hanna, Cindy Shavor, Lisbeth Garcia Arguello, Patrick Murray, Zhiyong Lu. Quality of Answers of Generative Large Language Models Versus Peer Users for Interpreting Laboratory Test Results for Lay Patients: Evaluation Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2024;26:e56655. doi: 10.2196/56655. PMID: 38630520 [Link]

Clinical Informatics / Clinical Research Informatics

Wenshan Han, Balu Bhasuran, Victorine Muse, Søren Brunak, Lifeng Lin, Karim Hanna, Yu Huang, Jiang Bian, Zhe He. Assessing the Seasonality of Lab Tests Among Patients with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias in OneFlorida Data Trust. AMIA 2024 Annual Symposium. 2024: 483-492. [Link]

Zhe He, Shubo Tian, Arslan Erdengasileng, Neil Charness, Jiang Bian. Temporal Subtyping of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Medical Conditions Preceding Alzheimer’s Disease Onset in Electronic Health Records. AMIA 2022 Informatics Summit. 2022; 2022: 226-235. PMID: 35854753. PMCID: PMC92851183 [Link]

Zhe He, *Xiang Tang, *Kelsa Bartley, Xi Yang, Yi Guo, Thomas J. George, Neil Charness, William Hogan, Jiang Bian. Clinical Trial Generalizability Assessment in the Big Data Era: A Review. Clinical and Translational Science. 2020; 13(4): 675-684. DOI: 10.1111/cts.12764. PMID: 32058639. [Link] [PubMed] [Dataset Publication]

Zhe He, Jiang Bian, Henry Carretta, Jiwon Lee, William Hogan, Elizabeth Shenkman, and Neil Charness. Prevalence of Multiple Chronic Conditions Among Older Adults in Florida and the United States: Comparative Analysis of the OneFlorida Data Trust and National Inpatient Sample. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2018; 20(4): e137. PMID: 29650502. PMCID: PMC5920146. [Link] [PubMed] [PMC]

Consumer Health Informatics

Juan Xie*, Zhe He, Gary Burnett, and Ying Cheng. How do mothers exchange parenting-related information in online communities? A meta-synthesis. Computers in Human Behavior. 2021; 115: 106631 (SSCI, Impact Factor: 5.003) [Free Access Link (till Jan 8, 2020) ]

Yu Lu, Xiao Luo, Zhan Zhang, and Zhe He. Retrieving Lab Test Related Questions from Social QA Sites By Combining Shallow Features and Deep Representations. AMIA 2020 Annual Symposium. November 14-18, 2020. Virtual. pp. 717-726. PMID: 33936453. PMCID: PMC8075538. [medRxiv] [PMC]

*Biyang Yu†, Zhe He†, Aiwen Xing, and Mia Liza Lustria. An Informatics Framework to Assess Consumer Health Language Complexity Differences: Proof-of-Concept Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2020;22(5):e16795. [Link]

Zhe He*, Zhiwei Chen, Sanghee Oh, Jinghui Hou, and Jiang Bian. Enriching consumer health vocabulary through mining a social Q&A site: a similarity-based approach. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2017;69:75-85. PMID: 28359728 [PubMed] [ScienceDirect] [PDF]

Explainable AI / Machine Learning for Healthcare

Zhe He, Shubo Tian, Ankita Singh, Shayok Chakraborty, Shenghao Zhang, Mia Liza A. Lustria, Neil Charness, Nelson Roque, Erin Harrell, Walter R. Boot. A Machine-Learning Based Approach for Predicting Older Adults’ Adherence to Technology-Based Cognitive Training. Information Processing and Management. 2022; 59(5): 103034.

Michael O. Killian, Seyedeh Neelufar Payrovnaziri, Dipankar Gupta, Dev Desai, and Zhe He. Machine learning-based prediction of re-hospitalization in pediatric organ transplantation recipients. JAMIA Open. 2021; 4(1): 1-10.

*Seyedeh Neelufar Payrovnaziri, Zhaoyi Chen, Pablo Rengifo-Moreno, Tim Miller, Jiang Bian, Jonathan H. Chen, Xiuwen Liu, and Zhe He. Explainable artificial intelligence models using real-world electronic health record Data: a systematic scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2020; 27(7): 1173-1185. PMID: 32417928. [Free Access Link] [PubMed]

Quality Assurance of Biomedical Terminologies / Ontologies

Ling Zheng†, Zhe He†, Duo Wei, Vipina Keloth, Jung-Wei Fan, Luke Lindemann, Xinxin Zhu, James Cimino, and Yehoshua Perl. A review of auditing techniques for the Unified Medical Language System. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2020; 27(10): 1625-1638. (†: equal-contribution first authors) [Free Access Link]

Muhammad F. Amith†, Zhe He†, Jiang Bian, Juan Antonio Lossio-Ventura, and Cui Tao*. Assessing the practice of biomedical ontology evaluation: Gaps and opportunities. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2018;80:1-13. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbi.2018.02.010. PMID. 29462669. (†: equal-contribution first authors) [FSU CCI News] [ScienceDirect] [PubMed]

Zhe He, James Geller, and Yan Chen. A comparative analysis of the density of the SNOMED CT conceptual content for semantic harmonization. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. 2015;64(1):29-40. PMID: 25890688. [ScienceDirect] [PDF] (Invited Talk at IHTSDO Implementation SIG Webinar [Slides] [Video]) (#14 Hottest Article April - June 2015)

Zhe He, Christopher Ochs, Ankur Agrawal, Yehoshua Perl, Dimitrios Zeginis, Konstantinos Tarabanis, Gai Elhanan, Michael Halper, Natasha Noy, and James Geller. A Family-Based Framework for Supporting Quality Assurance of Biomedical Ontologies in BioPortal. Proceedings of AMIA 2013 Annual Symposium (AMIA 2013) , November 16 - 20, 2013, Washington D.C. pp. 581-90. PMID: 24551360. [PubMed] [PDF] [Talk Slides] (Featured in "AMIA 2014 Year in Review")

Honors and Awards

2026 Graduate Faculty Mentor Award (five awardees for a year), Florida State University, April 2026
Pilot Award Winner, National A2 Pilot Grant Awards Competition, August 2025
Elected Fellow, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) [IMIA Announcement], August 2025
Third Place of the 2024 AMIA Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Innovation Award, November 2024
Pediatric Best Poster Award of 2024 American Transplant Congress, June 2024
Elected as an IEEE Senior Member, October 2023
2022 Lois Lunin Award. The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), June 2022
2022 Outstanding Faculty Research Award, College of Communication & Information, Florida State University, April 2022
Best Interdisciplinary Research Award, 2021 Aging and Health Informatics Conference, December 2021
Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA), May 2022.
2021 Faculty Leader/Builder Award, College of Communication & Information, Florida State University, April 2021
Co-advisor and co-first author of the 2nd place paper in the Student Paper Competition, AMIA 2019 Annual Symposium, November 2019
2019 Outstanding Faculty Research Award, College of Communication & Information, Florida State University, April 2019
Advisor and co-author for student finalist in AMIA Informatics Summit Student Paper Competition, March 2019
Distinguished Paper Award of AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium, November 2017 [CCI News]
2017 Outstanding Faculty Research Award, College of Communication & Information, Florida State University, April 2017
Runner Up, Most Interesting Preliminary Results Paper Award, iConference 2016, March 2016
Distinguished Paper Award of AMIA 2015 Annual Symposium, November 2015 [News Article]
MEDINFO 2015 Student Paper Award Nominee, August 2015
AMIA 2015 Summit on Clinical Research Informatics Student Paper Award Nominee, April 2015
Top Poster Award, 2014 Columbia University Postdoc Research and Career Symposium (One of the three awards among over 50 postdoc presenters)
Outstanding Leader Award 2013 - 2014, New Jersey Institute of Technology (One award is given annually)
Distinguished College Graduate of Beijing (10 out of over 400 graduates majored in Computer Science at BUPT )
Delegate of China in the 7th China Synergy Programme for Outstanding Youth (Highly selective 48 college student delegates in mainland China)

Membership

American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T)
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Sigma Xi

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