Yanshan Wang, PhD, FAMIA

Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research (Tenured), Department of Biomedical Informatics
Director of AI, Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI)
School of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh

Director of Center of Clinical Natural Language Processing (CCNLP)

Secondary Appointments:
• Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems, ISP
• Associate Professor of Clinical and Translational Research, CTSI
• Associate Member, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center
• Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, AI & Informatics, Mayo Clinic

Natural Language Processing Working Group Past Chair
American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)

yanshan.wang@pitt.edu

Lab: http://pitt.edu/~yaw89/

Introduction

Research Interests: Clinical Natural Language Processing; Artificial Intelligence (Machine/Deep Learning) Applications in Healthcare

Dr. Yanshan Wang is Vice Chair of Research and Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of AI in the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). He directs the Clinical NLP & AI Innovation Laboratory (PittNAIL), where his research focuses on generative AI, natural language processing, large language models, and AI infrastructure and applications in healthcare and biomedical research. His lab is one of the first to leverage these LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings for clinical purposes. He is the original author of the GREAT PLEA ethical principles and QUEST evaluation framework for the use of generative AI in healthcare. Dr. Wang has held national leadership roles in biomedical informatics, including the AMIA Natural Language Processing Working Group. His research focuses on developing scalable and trustworthy AI systems, including large language models, agentic and multi-agent AI architectures, clinical NLP technologies, and rigorous evaluation frameworks. His work aims to translate advances in AI into practical solutions for clinical decision support, clinical and translational research, and patient care.

Biography

Selected Publications

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Google Scholar ResearchGate

Thomas Yu Chow Tam, Sonish Sivarajkumar, Sumit Kapoor, Alisa V. Stolyar, Katelyn Polanska, Karleigh R. McCarthy, Hunter Osterhoudt, Xizhi Wu, Shyam Visweswaran, Sunyang Fu, Piyush Mathur, Giovanni E. Cacciamani, Cong Sun, Yifan Peng, Yanshan Wang. A framework for human evaluation of large language models in healthcare derived from literature review. npj Digital Medicine 7, no. 1 (2024): 258.
David Oniani, Jordan Hilsman, Yifan Peng, Ronald K. Poropatich, Jeremy C. Pamplin, Gary L. Legault, Yanshan Wang. Adopting and expanding ethical principles for generative artificial intelligence from military to healthcare. npj Digital Medicine 6, no. 1 (2023): 225.
Sonish Sivarajkumar, Yufei Huang, Yanshan Wang. Fair patient model: Mitigating bias in the patient representation learned from the electronic health records. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Vol. 148, 2023.
David Oniani, Sreekanth Sreekumar, Renuk DeAlmeida, Dinuk DeAlmeida, Vivian Hui, Young Ji Lee, Yiye Zhang, Leming Zhou, Yanshan Wang. Towards Improving Health Literacy in Patient Education Materials with Neural Machine Translation Models. AMIA Informatics Summit. 2023.
Hunter Osterhoudt, Courtney E. Schneider, Haneef A. Mohammad, Minmei Shih, Alexandra E. Harper, Leming Zhou, Elizabeth R. Skidmore, Yanshan Wang. Automated Fidelity Assessment for Strategy Training in Inpatient Rehabilitation using Natural Language Processing. AMIA Informatics Summit. 2023.
Sonish Sivarajkumar, Yanshan Wang. HealthPrompt: A Zero-shot Learning Paradigm for Clinical Natural Language Processing. AMIA 2022 Annual Symposium. 2022. Best Student Paper Finalist
David Oniani, Bambang Parmanto, Andi Saptono, Allyn Bove, Janet Freburger, Shyam Visweswaran, Nickie Cappella, Brian McLay, Jonathan C Silverstein, Michael J Becich, Anthony Delitto, Elizabeth Skidmore, Yanshan Wang. ReDWINE: A clinical datamart with text analytical capabilities to facilitate rehabilitation research. International Journal of Medical Informatics 177 (2023): 105144.
Oniani, David, Premkumar Chandrasekar, Sonish Sivarajkumar, Yanshan Wang. Few-Shot Learning for Clinical Natural Language Processing Using Siamese Neural Networks: Algorithm Development and Validation Study. JMIR AI 2 (2023): e44293.

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Honors and Media Coverage

Teaching

HI 2020 Practical Statistics & Programming Using Python and R
HI 2250 Foundations of Health Informatics

Lectures and Tutorials

Tutorial Methods and Applications of Natural Language Processing in Medicine. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME), Minneapolis, MN (Virtual due to COVID), August 25, 2020. (Slides)
Lecture A Simple Introduction to Natural Language Processing and Its Clinical Applications in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. South Dakota State University Data Science Symposium, February, 2020. (Abstract)
Tutorial Applications of Natural Language Processing in Clinical Research and Practice. The 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Minneapolis, MN, 2019. (Slides)
Tutorial RNN / LSTM Architectures and their applications in clinical note analytics, OSCT Annual Meeting: Deep Learning Foundation and Application with a Special Focus on Medical Informatics, Milwaukee, WI, May 6, 2019. (Video)

Funding

My research is supported by federal governments, research institutions, and companies:

NLM R01. Closing the loop with an automatic referral population and summarization system.
NCATS. ENACT: Translating Health Informatics Tools to Research and Clinical Decision Making. (Role: NLP Lead, Co-I)
SHRS Dean Award. Precision Rehabilitation. (Role: PI)
CTSI Awards. A3ST – AI Based Automated Fidelity Assessment for Strategy Training in Inpatient Rehabilitation. (Role: PI)
Pitt Momentum Funds. Improving Health Equity by Analyzing Social Determinants of Health from the Electronic Health Records. (Role: PI)
The Year of Data and Society Award. Understanding Bias in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for Health Care Through an Educational Health Informatics Hackathon. (Role: PI)
CHECE Research Award. Developing Artificial Intelligence Models to Automatically Identify Social Determinants of Health Among Minority Populations from the Electronic Health Records and to Provide Implications for Health Equity. (Role: PI)
NIH NLM-R01. Semi-structured Information Retrieval in Clinical Text for Cohort Identification. (Role: Co-I)
NIH NCATS-UL1. Supplement Investigation of Chronic Pain Management Based on Electronic Health Records. (Role: Co-I)
NIH NMH-R01. Leveraging EHR-linked biobanks for deep phenotyping, polygenic risk score modeling, and outcomes analysis in psychiatric disorders. (Role: Co-I)
NIH NINDS-R01. Enabling Comparative Effectiveness Research in Silent Brain Infarction Through Natural Language Processing and Big Data. (Role: Co-I)

Professional Service

Editorial: Biomedical Informatics Insights, Frontiers in AI, MedInfo
Journal Reviewer: Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, Journal of Medical Internet Research, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Knowledge-Based Systems, Neurocomputing, Plos One, Applied Clinical Informatics, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Pharmaceutical Medicine, Nucleic Acids Research.
Conference Reviewer: COLING, EMNLP, ACL, ACM-BCB, IEEE-BIBM, IEEE-ICHI, AMIA, AMIA-CRI, AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science, AMIA Annual Symposium, HEALTHINFO, BIOTECHNO, SEPDA, ICIBM.
PC member: ICHI, BIOTECHNO, NAACL, NLPCC, IHKDM, KDTBI, BIOTECHNO, LREC.
Chair and Steering committee: HealthNLP Workshop 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.
Organizer: BioCreative/OHNLP 2018 Challenge, 2019 n2c2/OHNLP Challenge.