About

Dr. Zifeng Wang builds AI scientists for biomedicine, with research spanning two foundations: scientific agents that reason over evidence and execute complex research workflows such as evidence synthesis, clinical trial design, patient recruitment, and biomedical data analysis, and scientific world models that provide grounded environments for evaluation and learning. Building on these foundations, he works toward scientific superintelligence through AI4AI and recursive self-improvement. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has published more than 20 first-author papers in leading AI conferences and journals, including NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACL, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Nature Communications, with more than 4,000 citations. He is also an entrepreneur with experience translating biomedical AI research into AI agent products sold to more than 10 biotech, pharmaceutical, hospital, and CRO partners.

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 & Chief AI Scientist, 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 Machine Intelligence, 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.