Sunyang Fu, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical and Health Informatics and the Associate Director of Team Science at the Center of Translational AI Excellence and Applications in Medicine (TEAM-AI) at the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, UTHealth Houston. Dr. Fu is the 2023-24 Leadership Fellow with the National Institutes of Health’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) and is affiliated with the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic. Before joining UTHealth Houston, he worked as a biomedical informatician and data scientist in the Department of AI and Informatics at Mayo Clinic. His research focuses on clinical natural language processing and clinical research informatics, with an emphasis on accelerating, improving, and governing the secondary use of electronic health records for valid, reproducible, and trustworthy discoveries. He is a co-author of the textbook Clinical Research Informatics and a co-editor of the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) playbook.
Dr. Fu’s current research focuses on developing and translating innovative informatics solutions to support Age-Friendly Health Systems for older adults. He has developed multiple NLP algorithms to extract geriatric syndromes and aging-related outcomes, including cerebrovascular disease, AD/ADRD, delirium, falls, and functional status. Specifically, the delirium algorithm was created based on the evidence-based framework called the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), which includes 13 unique concepts (e.g., agitation, disorganized thinking, and fluctuation). This work was featured by the Gerontological Society of America and highlighted as a promising example of using NLP techniques to accelerate pragmatic research trials. Dr. Fu also leads several national working groups (ENACT, OHDSI and AMIA) in the topic of aging informatics. Dr. Fu’s research is funded by CPRIT, National Institute of Aging, Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratories (AITC) for Aging Research and NIDUS. He is a member of the UTHealth Institute on Aging and the Network for Investigation of Delirium: Unifying Scientists.