معرفی
Dr. Hua Xu is the Robert T. McCluskey Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. He serves as Vice Chair for Research and Development in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and as Assistant Dean for Biomedical Informatics at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Xu leads the Clinical NLP Lab and is Chair of the NLP working group at the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program.
Dr. Xu received his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, an MS in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a BS in Biochemistry from Nanjing University.
Dr. Xu is a renowned researcher in clinical natural language processing (NLP), having developed novel algorithms for important clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and relation extraction. His work has been top-ranked in over a dozen international biomedical NLP challenges. He has developed CLAMP, a comprehensive clinical NLP toolkit that has been successfully commercialized and adopted by hundreds of healthcare organizations worldwide. His research focuses on applying NLP technologies to diverse clinical and translational studies to accelerate clinical evidence generation using electronic health records data. Recently, he has been utilizing NLP to harmonize metadata of biomedical digital objects to promote FAIR principles in biomedicine, and his lab is actively working on developing large language models (LLMs) for diverse biomedical applications.
Dr. Xu's recent publications demonstrate a clear trend toward leveraging large language models for biomedical applications. His work spans from benchmarking LLMs for clinical NLP tasks to developing specialized architectures like BiomedRAG (retrieval augmented LLMs for biomedicine). His research addresses critical healthcare challenges including adverse event extraction, oncology clinical trial analysis, and EHR-based association studies, showing how NLP can bridge the gap between unstructured clinical text and actionable medical insights.
Dr. Xu's lab has achieved top rankings in numerous NLP challenges, including multiple #1 positions in i2b2 Temporal information extraction, SemEval Disease-modifier extraction, BioCREATIVE Chemical-induced disease extraction, and other prestigious competitions. His contributions to clinical NLP have significantly advanced the field's ability to extract meaningful information from complex medical texts.
As the leader of the Clinical NLP Lab at Yale, Dr. Xu oversees research that forms a complete ecosystem: developing novel NLP methods, building robust software tools, and applying these technologies to clinical and translational research. His lab's work closes the loop between methodological innovation and practical healthcare applications, ensuring that advances in NLP directly benefit patient care and medical research.