Conversation with Yanshan Wang

Yanshan Wang, PhD, FAMIA is vice chair of Research and assistant professor within the Department of Health Information Management. His research interests focus on artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine/deep learning methodologies and applications in health care. His research goal is to leverage different dimensions of data and data-driven computational approaches to meet the needs of clinicians, researchers, patients and customers. Prior to joining Pitt, Wang was assistant professor in the Department of AI & Informatics at Mayo Clinic. Wang has led several NIH-funded projects, which aimed to develop NLP and AI algorithms to automatically extract information from free-text electronic health records (EHRs), such as clinical notes, radiology reports, and pathology reports. He proposed several novel NLP methodologies to improve information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE) from clinical notes and applied those novel NLP approaches in multiple disease areas, including depression, pediatric asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and fractures. He has served as Principal Investigator (PI) on multiple awards, including an Amazon AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) Award. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Wang has been actively serving the informatics and NLP communities. He has served as a Student Paper Competition Committee for the AMIA Annual Symposium and was an associate editor for MedInfo conference. He is also a regular reviewer for a dozen of prestigious journals, such as Nature Communications, Bioinformatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and PC members for multiple leading international conferences in health informatics, such as AMIA, ACM-BCB, IEEE-ICHI, and IEEE-BIBM. Wang also organized several shared tasks, including the first BioCreative/OHNLP challenge in 2018 and the second n2c2/OHNLP challenge in 2019, to encourage the informatics and NLP communities to tackle NLP problems in the clinical domain. He is also a steering committee member for the HealthNLP workshop. In 2020, he was inducted into the Fellows of AMIA (FAMIA).