Zhiyong Lu, Ph.D.

Dr. Lu's research group develops artificial intelligence (AI) methods and systems to advance biomedical discovery, information access, and clinical decision support. The group has a longstanding focus on biomedical natural language processing, information retrieval, and medical image analysis, with increasing emphasis on large language models, multimodal AI, and autonomous AI agents. A central goal of the research is to develop trustworthy AI solutions that can address complex biomedical and clinical problems and ultimately improve human health.

Current research areas include:

• Biomedical NLP, information retrieval, and evidence synthesis - developing AI methods to search, understand, and synthesize biomedical literature and other scientific information, including advanced evidence-grounded AI systems for complex biomedical questions.
• Large language models and AI agents for biomedicine - developing and rigorously evaluating LLMs and autonomous AI agents for biomedical research, knowledge discovery, and scientific reasoning.
• AI for clinical decision support and precision medicine - developing AI systems for clinical trial matching, patient-specific decision support, and other applications that bridge biomedical research and clinical care.
• Medical imaging and multimodal AI - developing deep learning and multimodal AI methods for automated disease diagnosis and prognosis from medical images, including chest X-rays and retinal imaging, and integrating visual information with language-based reasoning and clinical knowledge.

Dr. Zhiyong Lu is a Senior Investigator at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), where he leads research in artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications in biomedicine and healthcare. He joined NIH in 2007 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and became the first NIH Earl Stadtman Investigator in computational biology and health in 2011.

Dr. Lu is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). He is also an Adjunct Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has mentored more than 100 trainees at the NIH. His research and leadership have been recognized with multiple NIH honors, including the NIH Director's Award, NIH Director's Challenge Innovation Award, NIH Clinical Center CEO Award, and NLM Regents Award.