UMass BioNLP - People

This page contains current faculty, postdocs, students, and staff members. See also our alumni and affiliates.
[Updated September 2026]

Principal Investigator

Hong Yu, PhD (PI)

Prof. Hong Yu is a Professor at Miner School of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Lowell, Adjunct Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a research health scientist at Bedford Veterans Affairs Healthcare System. Prof. Yu is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She received her PhD from Columbia University.

Research Faculty and Postdocs

Zonghai Yao, PhD (Lowell)
Research Assistant Professor

Zonghai Yao is a Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UMass Lowell. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMass Amherst in 2026, advised by Hong Yu. His research develops learning and decision-making methods for trustworthy generative AI, with a focus on multimodal learning and agents that gather evidence, use tools, and learn from human feedback. He studies these methods in clinical decision support, patient support, and scientific research.

Feiyun Ouyang, PhD (Lowell)

Dr. Ouyang is a postdoctoral research associate at UMass Lowell since 2023. She received her PhD from Central South University, China. Her research focuses on epidemiology and influential factors of mental health and cardiovascular diseases.

PhD Students

Rumeng (Alice) Li (Amherst)
Clinical Information extraction, predictive modeling

Sunjae Kwon (Amherst)
NLP and medical informatics

Hieu Tran (Amherst)
LLMs, Instruction Tuning, Preference-based learning, RAG, Information Retrieval

Md. Shahidul Salim (Lowell)
Clinical Machine Translation, Summarization, Prompt Engineering, Multi-Agent Systems, Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs

Junda Wang (Amherst)
LLMs, Retriever, Multimodality, Multi-agents system, chatbot

Rohan Pandey (Amherst)
Trustworthy language modeling, predictive modeling, data imputation

Sharmin Sultana (Lowell)
Predictive modeling, Medical information retrieval

Won Seok Jang (Lowell)
Medical information retrieval, LLM-assisted patient education, multimodal LLMs

Yifan Zhang (Lowell)
Predictive modeling, EHR data imputation

Adiba Haque (Lowell)
Biomedical NLP, Multi-Agent LLM Systems, AI for Healthcare

Parth Vashisht (Lowell)
LLM Reasoning, Multi-Agent Systems, Synthetic Data Generation

Mingchen Li (Amherst)
Knowledge graphs, LLMs, Graph mining

Chanhwi Kim (Amherst)

Website · Scholar

Biomedical and clinical natural language processing, multimodal language models, explainable AI.

Benlu Wang (Amherst)

Scholar

Medical reasoning and evaluation in LLMs, medical calculations, multimodal question answering.

Raymond Xiong

Website · Scholar

Natural language processing and machine learning for healthcare, patient communication, clinical data analysis.

Alina Yildirim (Amherst)

Biomedical natural language processing, bioinformatics, computational biology.

Staff Members

Emily Druhl, MPH
(Veterans Affairs)
EHR Annotation, VA IRB management

Kathryn Dennison
(Project Administrator @ Lowell)
Administrative tasks

Raelene Goodwin
Contractor @ Lowell

EHR Annotation

Junhui Qian
Data Scientist @ Lowell

EHR Data Extraction and Epidemiologic Data Analysis

Esther Jennings, MPH
(Senior Research Manager @ Lowell)

Population Health, Research Management, Public Health Informatics

Alumni

Zonghai Yao, PhD in Computer Science (2026), UMass Amherst → Research Assistant Professor @ UMass Lowell
Avijit Mitra, PhD in Computer Science, UMass Amherst → Applied Scientist @ Amazon
Zhichao Yang, MS/PhD in Computer Science (2024), UMass Amherst → AI Research Scientist @ Optum
Jiachen Zhao, MS in Computer Science (2024), UMass Amherst → CS PhD student @ Northeastern University
Pengshan Cai, MS/PhD in Computer Science (2023), UMass Amherst → AI Research Scientist @ ASAPP
Minhwa Lee, MS in Computer Science (2023), UMass Amherst → Research Staff @ UMass Lowell
Prakamya Mishra, MS in Computer Science (2023), UMass Amherst → AI Research Engineer @ AMD
Bhanu Pratap Singh, MS/PhD in Computer Science (2022), UMass Amherst → Applied Scientist @ Amazon FireTV
Gary Wei, BS/MS in Computer Science (2022), UMass Amherst → Machine Learning Engineer @ ByteDance
Emmie Onuki, BS in Computer Science (2021), UMass Amherst → Software Engineer @ Asana
Yonghao Jin, PhD in Computer Science (2020), UMass Lowell → Software Engineer @ Google Japan
Fei Li, Postdoc in Computer Science (2020), UMass Lowell → Assistant Professor @ Wuhan University in China
Xun Wang, Postdoc in Computer Science (2020), UMass Lowell → Applied Scientist @ Microsoft
Jiaping Zheng, PhD in Computer Science (2020), UMass Amherst → Assistant Professor @ IUPUI
John Lalor, MS/PhD in Computer Science (2019), UMass Amherst → Assistant Professor @ University of Notre Dame
Baotian Hu, Postdoc (2015-2018), UMass Worcester → Professor @ Harbin Institute of Technology
Jinying Chen, Postdoc (2015-2017), UMass Worcester → Assistant Professor @ Boston University Medical School
Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Postdoc (2015-2017), UMass Worcester → Senior Researcher @ Microsoft Research
Laura Dietz, Postdoc (2013-2014), UMass Amherst → Assistant Professor @ University of New Hampshire