Halil Kilicoglu

Halil Kilicoglu is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Division of Nutritional Sciences, Personalized Nutrition Initiative, and Center for Health Informatics. His research bridges Natural Language Processing, Biomedical Informatics, and Scientific Reproducibility.

• Education: PhD in Computer Science (2012), Concordia University
• Previous Role: Staff Scientist, U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH)

Research Focus: Kilicoglu develops advanced NLP and machine learning techniques to extract and organize knowledge from biomedical texts. His work enhances clinical trial transparency, drug repurposing, literature-based discovery, and scientific communication. Current projects include automated assessment of randomized controlled trials and knowledge graph construction for biomedical domains.

Recent Article Trends: His publications emphasize transformer models, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-label classification applied to citation integrity, diet-microbiome associations, and clinical trial reporting.

Scientific Awards:

• TrustNLP 2023 Best Paper
• SemEval 2021 Best System Paper
• IMIA Yearbook Best Paper (2020, 2017)
• AMIA Distinguished Paper (2016, 2007)

Students: Mentors PhD candidates in information science and informatics, including Janina Sarol, Lan Jiang, Mengfei Lan, Shufan Ming, Gibong Hong, Evan Guerra, and Joe Menke.

Labs & Teams: Leads a lab at the iSchool focused on biomedical text mining, collaborating with institutions like NIH and SpringerNature. Projects include SemRep extension, MENAGERIE tool, and COMBINI initiative.