About Me

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology, also a joint faculty with the Department of Computer Science. I am previously a research fellow with Prof. Timothy Miller and Prof. Guergana Savova in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I completed my Ph.D. of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, co-supervised by Prof. Madhav Marathe and Prof. Jiangzhuo Chen.

[08/22/2025] There are NO openings.

Research Interests

My research interests span across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), natural language processing (NLP), time series analysis, graph learning, and network science, with a strong emphasis on solving problems in networks and sequences. My work is inherently interdisciplinary, bridging theoretical foundations with practical applications to address complex, real-world challenges, such as epidemic forecasting, EHR data analysis, human behavior analysis, or recommender systems.

Big Events

  • The ICDM 2025 conference will be held in Washington DC, in November 2025. My colleague and I are organizing the PhD Forum. More details are coming, please refer to this link.
  • The AAAI 2025 conference will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in February, 2025. My colleague and I are organizing a two-day doctoral consortium for AAAI. PhD students are encouraged to submit their work by Sep 30, 2024. For more details, please refer to this link. Accepted submissions (thesis summary) will automatically be included in the AAAI proceedings.
  • We will have an exciting debate: Teaching in AI Era: Challenges and Opportunities at ACSIC (Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing) SOFA 2024, May 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to come and join us!

    • Recent News

    • 07/2025 Our paper 'To what Degree can LLMs Support Medical Informatics Research? Examining the Interplay of Research Support LLMs with LLM Critics' is accepted by AMIA Annual Symposium 2025.
    • 04/2025 Our paper 'A Concept Utility Framework for Incremental Ontology Expansion' is accepted by Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems: e-Health 2025.
    • 04/2025 Our paper 'KEGNN: Knowledge-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for User Engagement Prediction' is accepted by ICMR 2025.
    • 03/2025 Received Two Grace Hopper Artificial Intelligence Research Grants. Thanks NJIT!
    • 08/2024 Our paper 'When Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence: Topics and Sentiments about ChatGPT in Online Knowledge Sharing Communities' is accepted by HICSS 2024.
    • 12/2023 Our paper 'Exploring Graph Structure in Graph Neural Networks for Epidemic Forecasting' is presented at NeurIPS 2023 Temporal Graph Learning Workshop.
    • 10/2023 Our paper 'A computable case definition for patients with SARS-CoV2 testing that occurred outside the hospital' is published at JAMIA OPEN.
    • 06/2023 Invited to serve as PC for IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, NeurIPS, ICML, IEEE BigData.
    • 05/2023 Our paper 'Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Improved Bias and Variance for Large Pretrained Language Models' is accepted at ACL'23.
    • 04/2023 Received NJIT FY24 Faculty Seed Grant. Thank you NJIT!