Research Program
Dr. Qin's group develops AI and computational frameworks that explain biological complexity, accelerate biomedical discovery, and serve global health equity. Work spans foundation models for biomedicine, agentic AI for clinical reasoning, mathematical and network models of aging, and pandemic prediction with knowledge-augmented generative AI.
AI for Global Health
Dr. Qin's group designs trustworthy and equitable AI for public-health applications: pandemic prediction, wastewater genomic surveillance, viral fitness estimation, and disparities in disease burden. Recent projects include explainable models for SARS-CoV-2 transmission fitness, federated learning across health systems, and fair multimodal COVID-19 detection. Dr. Qin served as Program Chair of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Machine Intelligence for Equitable Global Health (2024, 2025) and Workshop Co-Chair of AAAI 2026.
Selected partners: AIM-AHEAD; BioBot Analytics; Ohio Department of Public Health; Tennessee Hamilton County Department of Health; Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine.
Agentic AI for Medicine
Dr. Qin's group is building LLM-driven agents that reason over electronic health records, genomic and multi-omic profiles, imaging, and the clinical literature. Goals include automated biomarker discovery, hypothesis generation for biomedical research, and decision-support workflows with embedded explainability, fairness controls, and human-in-the-loop safety.
Foundation AI Models
Dr. Qin's group conducts research on knowledge-augmented transformers, single-cell foundation models (e.g., scGPT fine-tuning), protein language models, and gene-network-as-attention representations for hypothesis-driven genomics AI. The group's generative viralGPT framework predicts viral variants and biothreats (US provisional patent 63/855,872; licensing under negotiation).
Mathematical Biology
Dr. Qin's group develops probabilistic gene-network models of cellular aging, evolutionary fitness landscapes for viral variants, reliability-theoretic frameworks for biological robustness, and emergent-aging models that treat aging as a system-level property of interacting components.
Aging & Healthspan
Funded by NSF CAREER and the National Academy of Medicine Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge (2022 winner), Dr. Qin's group studies molecular mechanisms of aging using interpretable deep learning, microfluidic imaging of yeast replicative lifespan, mortality-curve mixture modeling, and protein-interaction network analysis.
Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD)
In partnership with the NIH-funded PennAITech consortium (P30AG073105), Dr. Qin's group develops knowledge-augmented transformers for AD diagnosis and biomarker discovery, integrating clinical, imaging, and multi-omic data with explainable AI.
Active Funding
- PI, NIH A2 Collective — Knowledge-Augmented Transformers for AD Diagnosis and Biomarker Discovery (PennAITech subaward, NIH P30AG073105), 2025–2026.
- PI, NSF — AAAI Fall Symposium Student Travel Support, 2025–2026.
- Co-PI, NASA — Remote Sensing of Water Quality in the Tennessee River, 2024–2026.
- PI, NSF CCF — PIPP Phase I: Computational Frameworks to Predict and Prevent Future Coronavirus Pandemics, 2022–2026.
Industrial and Governmental Collaborations
- Admera Health — multimodal generative AI models, 2024–present.
- Amazon Web Services — development of viralGPT on AWS Cloud, 2023–present.
- BioBot Analytics — wastewater genomic surveillance, 2023–2024.
- Brimrose Technology Corporation — pandemic prevention, 2023–2024.
- Ohio Department of Public Health — wastewater genomic surveillance, 2024.
- Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, 2023–2024.
- Tennessee Hamilton County Department of Health — public health dashboard, Spring 2024.