Hi, I'm Zifeng. I am the cofounder and Chief AI Scientist at Keiji.AI. Before that, I did my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UIUC. I work toward scientific superintelligence: AI systems that can reason, experiment, and collaborate with experts across the scientific process. My current work builds environments, foundation models, and harnesses for agent evaluation and training across high-stakes clinical development tasks:
Building Keiji.AI, where we develop validated virtual environments for using, evaluating, and training AI agents on high-stakes clinical development tasks, including trial design, eligibility optimization, patient recruitment, evidence synthesis, clinical data management, and IND/NDA submission for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
News
- Jul 2026 Tutorial: guidance on the use of large language models for medical research accepted in Nature Protocols!
- Jun 2026 Three papers accepted: TrialPanorama (npj Digital Medicine), Deep Knowledge Graph Research for biomedical evidence synthesis (Nature Machine Intelligence), and reliable data science copilots (Nature Biomedical Engineering)!
- Apr 2026 Serving as Area Chair for COLM 2026.
- Mar 2026 Gave invited talks on "Empowering Clinical Development with LLMs and AI Agents" at Columbia, Yale, CUHK, Tsinghua Medicine, Duke-NUS, and more.
- Aug 2025 LEADS (foundation model for medical literature mining) published in Nature Communications!
- Jul 2025 InformGen published in JAMIA; clinical evidence synthesis and the generalist-to-medical AI perspective published in npj Digital Medicine.
- Sep 2025 Our work covered by MIT Technology Review and Nature Biotechnology.
- May 2025 Joined Keiji.AI as cofounder and Chief AI Scientist!
- Mar 2025 Defended my Ph.D. dissertation: Deep learning methods for clinical trial design, execution, and analysis!
- Mar 2025 TrialGPT featured as Health Science Top 25 of 2024 by Nature Communications!
- Nov 2024 TrialGPT for patient-trial matching accepted by Nature Communications! Featured as Editors' Highlights.
- Nov 2024 Perspective paper on adapting generalist AI to medicine released!
- Nov 2024 Paper on LLMs for clinical data science code generation released!
- Jun 2024 Two papers released: clinical trial foundation model and LLM pipeline for clinical evidence synthesis.
- Mar 2024 Our research on AI for clinical trials reported by Nature: How AI is being used to accelerate clinical trials.
- Feb 2024 Patient-trial matching research reported by AUA News.
Recent Talks
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2026 Biomedical Literature Evidence Exploration and Synthesis in the Era of AI Agents
- Panel Speaker on AI in Clinical Development @ Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2026
- Text Mining Panel @ ISMB 2026
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2025 Empowering Biomedicine with LLMs and AI Agents
- CS @ Nanjing University
- AI @ SJTU
- Shanghai AI Lab
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2025 LLMs for hypothesis generation and validation in clinical trials
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2025 LLMs for clinical trial participant recruitment
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2024 Bridging Biomedical Foundation Models
- Xuegong Lab @ Tsinghua University
- AI4Science @ ByteDance
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2023 Medical Vision-Language Modeling
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Oct 2023 Automate clinical trial design with large language models
- Medidata
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Jul 2023 Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs
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- AI Time
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- AI Time
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Mar 2022 PAC-Bayes Information Bottleneck
Selected Publications
Media Coverage
- 2026 JAMIA (Editorial): Improved evaluation frameworks are required to move application of LLMs from research into clinical practice
- 2026 Live Science: AI-written code can beat humans at biomedical analysis, some studies find
- 2025 MIT Technology Review: A clinical trial database of 1.65 million records for vertical AI agents
- 2025 Nature Biotechnology: Clinical trials gain intelligence
- 2024 Nature: How AI is being used to accelerate clinical trials
- 2024 NIH Director's Blog: ChatGPT-like AI tool promises to speed treatment advances by matching patients with clinical trials
- 2024 POLITICO: Using AI to match patients to clinical trials
- 2024 NIH News: NIH-developed AI algorithm matches potential volunteers to clinical trials





