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Hua Xu, PhD

The Glassell Family Distinguished Professor
Director, Center for Translational AI in Medicine
Associate Dean for Innovation, School of Biomedical Informatics

Hua Xu, PhD, is the Glassell Family Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean for Innovation at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics. He also serves as Director of Center for Translational AI in Medicine, where he leads a group of researchers working on novel AI technologies and their applications to clinical practice. He earned a Doctor of Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University in New York City. Before moving to Houston, Hua was an assistant professor at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville.

Dr. Xu’s research interests include natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and their applications to clinical and translational research and practice. He has served as principal investigator (PI) or site-PI for dozens research grants from multiple agencies (i.e., NLM, NCI, NIGMS, NIA, AHA, and CPRIT). Informatics methods/tools developed in his lab have been top ranked in a number of biomedical NLP shared tasks and widely used to support diverse biomedical applications. His research resulted in over 280 papers published in prestigious informatics journals and conference proceedings.

He is an elected fellow of American College of Medical Informatics. He served as the Chair of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) NLP Working Group and now leads the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) NLP Working Group.

Contact

 Hua.Xu@uth.tmc.edu
Phone: 713-500-3924
Fax: 713-500-3929
 Biomedical Natural Language Processing Lab

Staff Support

Yukiko Bryson
Phone: 713-500-3992

Education

  • PhD in biomedical informatics, Columbia University, 2008
  • MPhil in biomedical informatics, Columbia University, 2007
  • MS in computer science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2001
  • BS in biochemistry, Nanjing University, 1998

Areas of Expertise

  • Natural language processing: methods, software, applications
  • EHR-based drug outcome studies: pharmacovigilance, pharmacogenomics, and drug repurposing
  • Healthcare analytics: quality measure, predictive modeling
  • Precision Medicine

Active Funding

RADx-Rad Discoveries & Data: Consortium Coordination Center Program Organization
NIH 1U24LM013755 (MPI - Ohno-Machado, Aronoff-Spencer, Xu)
12/21/2020 – 11/30/2024

Facilitate Observational Studies of Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementias Using Ontology and Natural Language Processing
NIA 1RF1AG072799 (MPI – Xu, Tao, Liu)
05/01/2021 - 04/30/2024

TriPOD: Toward Reusable Phenotypes in Observational Data for AD/ADRD - managing definitions and correcting bias
NIA 1R01AG073435 (MPI – Chen, Xu)
09/15/2021 – 05/31/2026

PheBC: bias correction methods for EHR derived phenotype
NLM R01LM013519 (MPI – Chen, Xu)
09/01/2021 – 05/31/2025

Advancing Drug Repositioning for Alzheimer’s Disease using Real-world Data
NIA 1R56AG069880 (MPI – Wu, Bian, Chen, Xu)
04/01/2021 - 03/31/2023

Advancing Cancer Pharmacoepidemiology Research through EHRs and Informatics
NCI U24 CA194215 01A1 (MPI - Xu, Warner, Yang)
09/01/2016-08/31/2022

Open Health Natural Language Processing Collaboratory
NIH/NCATS, U01TR002062 (PI- Liu, Jiang, Pakhomov)
09/01/2017-08/31/2022

All of Us (AoU) Data and Research Support Center
NIH U2C OD023196 01 (PI – Harris, Roden)
07/01/2016-12/31/2022

Genetic & Social Determinants of Health: Center for Admixture Science and Technology NIH
1RM1HG011558 (PI – Ohno-Machado)
09/15/2021 – 05/31/2025

Publications

See google scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_Uv5LIAAAAAJ&hl=en