About
Interdisciplinary scholar bridging artificial intelligence, data science, computational biology, and public health. Dr. Qin's group develops explainable and knowledge-augmented AI for aging and Alzheimer's disease, agentic AI workflows for medicine, foundation models for biomedical discovery, and mathematical and computational models for pandemic prediction. Dr. Qin's research and education programs have engaged collaborators across academia, federal agencies, healthcare, and industry, and have trained more than 150 students and trainees across postdoctoral, graduate, undergraduate, and REU stages.
Research Themes
AI for Global Health
Dr. Qin's group builds trustworthy, equitable AI for population health, pandemic prediction, wastewater genomic surveillance, and health-disparity research. Dr. Qin served as Program Chair of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Machine Intelligence for Equitable Global Health (2024, 2025).
Agentic AI for Medicine
Dr. Qin's group develops LLM-driven agents that reason over electronic health records, multi-omic profiles, and clinical literature to assist diagnosis, biomarker discovery, and decision support, with embedded explainability and safety controls.
Foundation AI Models
Dr. Qin's group works on knowledge-augmented transformers, single-cell and protein foundation models, and generative AI for biomedicine, including viralGPT, a generative-AI framework for viral pathogen prediction (US provisional patent 63/855,872).
Mathematical Biology
Dr. Qin's group develops probabilistic gene-network models of cellular aging, evolutionary fitness landscapes for viral variants, and reliability-theoretic frameworks for biological robustness, complexity, and emergence.
Aging
Dr. Qin's group applies interpretable deep learning to aging clocks, derives network and proteomic biomarkers of yeast replicative aging, and builds translational frameworks linking molecular aging to human healthspan and longevity.
Alzheimer's Disease & ADRD
Dr. Qin's group develops knowledge-augmented transformers for AD diagnosis and biomarker discovery in partnership with the NIH/Penn AITech consortium and AIM-AHEAD, integrating multimodal biomedical data with explainable AI.
Recent Highlights
- PI, NIH/PennAITech (P30AG073105) subaward, Knowledge-Augmented Transformers for AD Diagnosis and Biomarker Discovery, 2025–2026.
- Workshop Co-Chair, AAAI 2026; Program Chair, AAAI Fall Symposium on Machine Intelligence for Equitable Global Health (2024, 2025).
- 2025 Editor of Distinction Award, Springer Nature.
- 2022 Winner, National Academy of Medicine Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge.
- Provisional patent for viralGPT (US 63/855,872); licensing under negotiation.
- NSF CAREER awardee; led NSF PIPP Phase I and Phase II national-center proposals on pandemic prediction.
Dr. Qin's Other Online Sites
- YouTube educational channel — ~353 videos, ~1,530 subscribers, >700,000 views.
- GitHub — QinLab — lab code, datasets, and research repositories.
- Twitter / X — @hongqin