Degui Zhi

Dr. Zhi is founding chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine. He is the Glassell Family Professor and founding director of Center for AI and Genome Informatics (AIGI). He received his PhD in bioinformatics at UC San Diego. Before joining UTHealth, he was a tenured associate professor of statistical genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Zhi is interested in developing AI deep learning and informatics methods for biomedical big data. His team develops multiple generalist deep learning frameworks for the modeling of biobank-scale biomedical data. Recent works from the lab includes Med-BERT, a clinical foundation model for structured clinical data, gene2vec, a distributed representation embedding model for genes based their co-expression patterns, and several unsupervised deep learning models for deriving endophenotypes from imaging data for genetic discovery. His team also developed advanced PBWT-based data structures and algorithms for population genetics informatics. His methodological research has been funded by multiple PI/MPI grants. His current funded projects cover topics in AI-powered brain imaging and retina imaging genetics, population genetics informatics, EHR predictive modeling. He is also interested in using LLM and genitive AI for scientific discoveries. For this ReCARDO U24 project, he is in a unique position to and will support the biomarker and data ecosystem Work Streams in the proposed project.