About

Zifeng Wang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on AI, large language models, and AI agents for drug discovery and clinical development. Dr. Wang has published extensively in leading AI venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and IJCAI, as well as in high-impact journals including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, and npj Digital Medicine. His research has been translated into TrialMind at Keiji AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform adopted by several pharmaceutical companies to support drug discovery and clinical development workflows.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2021–2025
- Advisor: Jimeng Sun.
- Committee: Zhiyong Lu, Jiawei Han, Hanghang Tong, Sheng Wang.
M.S., Data Science, Tsinghua University, 2018–2021
- Advisors: Shao-Lun Huang & Khalid M. Mosalam.
B.S., Engineering, Tongji University, 2014–2018

Working Experience

Cofounder & Head of AI, Keiji.AI, May 2025 – Present.
Research Intern, AWS, Amazon, May–Aug. 2023.
- Topic: AI for Drug Discovery.
- Mentor: Zichen Wang.
Research Intern, Medidata, Dassault Systèmes, Feb–May 2023.
- Topic: Synthetic Data Generation for Clinical Trials.
- Mentor: Mandis Beigi.
Research Intern, Amplitude, May–Aug. 2022.
- Topic: Multi-treatment Causal Inference.
- Mentor: Cao Xiao.
Research Intern, Jarvis Lab, Tencent, Dec. 2019 – Jun. 2021.
- Topics: Graph DL for Clinical Diagnosis; Lifelong Learning Diagnostic AI; Information-theoretic DL.
- Mentor: Yefeng Zheng.

Honors & Awards

2024 Research featured by NIH: AI algorithm matches potential volunteers to clinical trials
2023 Yee Memorial Fellowship, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 NeurIPS Scholar Award, Neural Information Processing Systems Conference
2022 Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2021 Best Student Paper Award, Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD)

Service

Area Chair: COLM (2026).
Program Committee / Reviewer: NeurIPS (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), EMNLP (2022, 2023), IJCAI (2022, 2023, 2024), AAAI (2022, 2024, 2025), NAACL (2024), COLM (2024, 2025), ICLR (2024, 2025), ICML (2025), ACL (2023), KDD (2023), NLPCC (2024).
Journal Reviewer: Nature Communications, npj Digital Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Bioinformatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ACM Computing Surveys.
Co-host of the AI for Health Webinar.

Teaching Experience

Spring 2022, TA for CS598 Deep Learning for Healthcare at UIUC, given by Prof. Jimeng Sun.
Summer 2020, TA for Optimization Models and Applications, given by Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui.
Spring 2020, TA for Bayesian Learning and Data Analysis, given by Prof. Ercan E. Kuruoglu.
Fall 2019, TA for Learning from Data, given by Prof. Yang Li.