Zifeng Wang is the co-founder and head of AI at Keiji.AI. Before that, he did his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Professor Jimeng Sun. He is dedicated to leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate scientific discovery in medicine. His research focuses on AI-driven literature research, data science research, and clinical research, with an emphasis on improving literature search, screening, and data extraction, automating the analysis and modeling of clinical trials and real-world data, and optimizing clinical trial design, recruitment, and outcome analysis.
His work has been featured in Nature, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIH Director's Blog, POLITICO, and other media outlets. Before joining UIUC, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tongji University and Tsinghua University, respectively.
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Advisor: Prof. Jimeng Sun
Dissertation: Deep Learning Methods for Clinical Trial Design, Execution, and Analysis
Focus on AI for healthcare, clinical trials, and biomedical research.
M.S. in Data Science
Tsinghua University
Specialized in machine learning and artificial intelligence with focus on healthcare applications.
B.S. in Engineering
Tongji University
Professional Experience
Co-founder & Head of AI
Leading AI development for clinical trial optimization and pharmaceutical applications.
Research Intern
Topic: Synthetic Data Generation for Clinical Trials
Mentor: Mandis Beigi
Research Intern
Topics: Graph DL for Clinical Diagnosis; Lifelong Learning Diagnostic AI; Information-theoretic DL
Mentor: Yefeng Zheng
Service
PC Member/Reviewer for Conferences
ICML'[25], NeurIPS'[22,23,24], EMNLP'[22,23], IJCAI'[22,23,24], AAAI'[22,24,25], NAACL'24, COLM'[24,25], ICLR'24, ACL'23, KDD'23, NLPCC'24, ICIP'21, RECOMB'25, ICASSP'21.
Reviewer for Journals
Nature Communications, TPAMI, JAIR, JAMIA, TMLR, TMI, Bioinformatics, ACM Computing Surveys.
Teaching Experience
CS598 Deep Learning for Healthcare
Teaching Assistant at UIUC, given by Prof. Jimeng Sun.
Optimization Models and Applications
Teaching Assistant, given by Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui.
Bayesian Learning and Data Analysis
Teaching Assistant, given by Prof. Ercan E. Kuruoglu.
Learning from Data
Teaching Assistant, given by Prof. Yang Li.
Awards and Honors
Research featured in Nature
Research featured by NIH
"AI algorithm matches potential volunteers to clinical trials"
Yee Memorial Fellowship
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
NeurIPS Scholar Award
Neural Information Processing Systems Conference
Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Best Student Paper Award
Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD)