Zhe He (何辙), PhD, FAMIA, IEEE Senior Member

[ How to pronounce my name?  The pronunciation of "Zhe" is similar to "Geor(gia)" sound. The pronunciation of "He" is like "her" but without the "r" sound (the British accent). ]

Associate Professor, School of Information,  Florida State University

Informatics Lead and Director, Biostatistics, Informatics, and Research Design (BIRD) Program of UF-FSU Clinical and Translational Science Award

Associate Professor (courtesy), Department of Behavioral Sciences & Social Medicine, College of Medicine, Florida State University

Associate Professor (courtesy), Department of Computer Science, Florida State University

Director, eHealth Lab, College of Communication and Information, Florida State University

Chair-Elect (2024), Vice Chair (2023), Secretary (2020-2022),  AMIA Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group

Address: 271 Shores Building, 142 Collegiate Loop. Tallahassee FL, 32306-2100

Phone: 850.644.5775

Email: zhe AT fsu DOT edu

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Biography

I am a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Information (iSchool) at the Florida State University and a Core Affiliate of the Institute for Successful Longevity. I am also holding courtesy appointments with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and  Social Medicine of the College of Medicine and the Department of Computer Science. At Florida State, I am the Informatics Lead and Director of Biostatistics, Informatics, and Research Design (BIRD) Program in the UF-FSU Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). 

I am a Health Data Scientist with formal Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics training. My research lies at the intersection of Biomedical & Health Informatics, Computer Science, and Information Science. My research expertise includes deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, ontologies, knowledge representation, and big data analytics. At FSU, I direct the eHealth Lab.  The overarching goal of my research is to improve population health and advance biomedical research through the application of informatics and big data.  As Principal Investigator, my research has been funded by the National Library of Medicine / NIH, National Institute on Aging / NIH, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), UF Clinical and Translational Science Insitute, Eli Lilly and Company, Amazon, NVIDIA, FSU Council on Research and Creativity, and Institute for Successful Longevity. I have served as a PI of an NIA/NIH R01 grant (APPT), an AHRQ R21/R33 grant (LabGenie), an NLM/NIH R21 grant (pediatric transplantation outcomes prediction), and an NIA/NIH R21 grant (clinical trial generalizability analysis). The total grant award I received since joining FSU in 2015 exceeds $15 million. 

I received an MS from Columbia University in 2009 and a BS from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2007, both in Computer Science.  I received PhD in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2014,  where I worked with Dr. James Geller and Dr. Yehoshua Perl in the Structural Analysis of Biomedical Ontologies Center (SABOC). My doctoral thesis centers on quality assurance methodologies for controlled biomedical vocabularies - Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), SNOMED CT, and domain ontologies in BioPortal. Before joining FSU in Fall 2015, I was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University between 2014 and 2015, working with Dr. Chunhua Weng. In my postdoctoral research, I developed informatics methods to assess the collective population representativeness of clinical studies to improve the transparency of study generalizability to the real-world population. I received early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure from FSU in 2020.  During my sabbatical year 2023-2024, I visited the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine/NIH as a Guest Researcher. At NCBI, I studied biomedical natural language processing and text engineering using knowledge bases and large language models.

I have published over 120  papers in leading biomedical informatics venues including JAMIA, JBI, AIIM, JMIR, AMIA, and MEDINFO. My papers received a number of 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 community as an Editorial Board Member of 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 am currently Chair-elect (2024) (Former Secretary 2020-2022, Vice Chair 2023) of AMIA Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDDM) Working Group. I'm a regular reviewer for over 30 prestigious journals, including Nature Medicine,  NPJ Digital Medicine (a sister journal of Nature), Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. I am General Chair of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2024) and Program Chair of the Ninth IEEE/ACM International Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE 2024). I have also chaired the International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Health Data Analytics (SEPDA) 6 times and served as a Program Committee Member in more than 40 academic conferences, including AMIA Annual Symposium, AMIA Informatics Summit, MEDINFO,  and IEEE BIBM. 

In 2014, I was inducted into Alpha Epsilon Lambda National Graduate and Professional Honor Society. In 2020, I joined Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. In 2022, I was inducted as a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). I received the 2022 Lois Lunin Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). In 2023, I was elected as an IEEE Senior Member.

In my spare time, I am interested in photography and traveling. This is my Photography Studio.

Research Interests

Selected Publications (All Publications)

Clinical Research Informatics

Consumer Health Informatics

Explainable AI / Machine Learning for Healthcare

Quality Assurance of Biomedical Terminologies / Ontologies

Honors and Awards