Kun Lu

Kun Lu is an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies (an iSchool) at The University of Oklahoma, serving as Co-Director of the Data Scholarship Program. His research focuses on applied natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval, text mining, and science informatics. He develops NLP methods for domains like oncology clinical trials, materials science, and Native American literature analysis. His work emphasizes interdisciplinary applications, including improving patient-clinical trial matching and accelerating materials discovery through machine learning. Dr. Lu teaches courses such as Information Retrieval & Text Mining and Database Design, and has secured grants totaling over $750,000 from NIH and institutional seed funds.

Key projects include NIH-funded work on clinical trial optimization ($717,666), seed-funded studies on LLM applications in materials design, and HathiTrust-based Native American literature analysis. His award-winning research includes a 2011 Highly Commended Award for health information retrieval interface evaluation. Publications span 35+ peer-reviewed articles in top journals like Scientometrics, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and PLOS ONE, with recent focus on generative AI, domain-specific NLP, and scientific literature analysis.

• Affiliations: School of Library and Information Studies, Data Scholarship Program, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences
• Grants: NIH grant (2024-2026), OU seed funds for materials science and clinical trials projects
• Research Themes: NLP applications, scientometrics, health informatics, interdisciplinary data science