Hi, I'm Zifeng. I am the cofounder and head of AI at Keiji.AI. Before that, I did my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Sunlab @ UIUC, advised by Prof. Jimeng Sun. I work toward trustworthy AI-driven clinical development and decision-making through three directions:

Biomedical Evidence Synthesis — developing AI methods that retrieve, extract, integrate, and reason over literature, clinical trials, real-world data, and biomedical knowledge bases, enabling scalable evidence synthesis for drug discovery and translational medicine [Nat. Commun. '25, npj Digit. Med. '25, Nat. Mach. Intell. '26]
Virtual Patients — building virtual patient and trial models to enable treatment response prediction, patient digital twins, and trial optimization [NeurIPS '22, KDD '23, IJCAI '24]
Clinical Foundation Models and Agents — developing foundation models and AI agents that execute trial design, patient recruitment, document generation, and clinical data science tasks with interpretable and verifiable outputs [Nat. Commun. '24, npj Digit. Med. '26, Nat. Biomed. Eng. '26]
Current Focus

Building Keiji.AI, where we develop validated virtual environments for evaluating and training AI agents on high-stakes clinical development tasks, including trial design, eligibility optimization, patient recruitment, evidence synthesis, clinical data management, and new drug submission for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

News

Recent Talks

Invited Talk
@ Columbia DBMI Seminar
AI for Health Webinar
@ UIUC
Invited Talk (Chinese)
@ HIT Webinar

Selected Publications

TrialPanorama
Benchmarking and Developing Large Language Models Using One Million Clinical Trials (TrialPanorama)
Zifeng Wang, Jiacheng Lin, Qiao Jin, Junyi Gao, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhiyong Lu, Jimeng Sun.
npj Digital Medicine, 2026
[Paper] [Project]
News Coverage: Nature Biotechnology, MIT Technology Review, HyperAI
DeepEvidence
Empowering Biomedical Evidence Exploration and Synthesis with Deep Knowledge Graph Research
Zifeng Wang, Zheng Chen, Ziwei Yang, Xiao Wang, Qiao Jin, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu, Jimeng Sun.
Nature Machine Intelligence, 2026
[Paper]
Data science copilots
Making Large Language Models Reliable Data Science Programming Copilots for Biomedical Research
Zifeng Wang, Benjamin Danek, Ziwei Yang, Zheng Chen, Jimeng Sun.
Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2026
[Paper]
News Coverage: Live Science
LEADS
A foundation model for human-AI collaboration in medical literature mining (LEADS)
Zifeng Wang, Lang Cao, Qiao Jin, Joey Chan, Nicholas Wan, Behdad Afzali, Hyun-Jin Cho, Chang-In Choi, Mehdi Emamverdi, Manjot K. Gill, Sun-Hyung Kim, Yijia Li, Yi Liu, Yiming Luo, Hanley Ong, Justin Rousseau, Irfan Sheikh, Jenny J. Wei, Ziyang Xu, Christopher M. Zallek, Kyungsang Kim, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu, Jimeng Sun.
Nature Communications, 2025
[Paper]
Clinical evidence synthesis
Accelerating Clinical Evidence Synthesis with Large Language Models
Zifeng Wang, Lang Cao, Benjamin Danek, Qiao Jin, Zhiyong Lu, Jimeng Sun.
npj Digital Medicine, 2025
[Paper]
TrialGPT
Matching Patients to Clinical Trials with Large Language Models (TrialGPT)
Qiao Jin, Zifeng Wang, Charalampos S. Floudas, Fangyuan Chen, Changlin Gong, Dara Bracken-Clarke, Elisabetta Xue, Yifan Yang, Jimeng Sun, Zhiyong Lu.
Nature Communications, 2024
[Paper]
News Coverage: Nature, NIH News, NIH Director's Blog, Health Science Top 25 of 2024, POLITICO, AUA News, Azure Government, Informa, FedScoop, MSN

Media Coverage