Vanderbilt University Medical Center · Biomedical Informatics
OHPEN Lab
We build human-centered, agentic AI for healthcare delivery — and graph AI for drug safety and therapeutic discovery.
Who we are
Directed by You Chen, PhD, FAMIA, we turn large-scale, multimodal health data — EHRs, clinical notes, audit logs, genomics, and wearables — into AI systems that are deployed against real clinical problems. Our active projects predict next-day hospital discharge, map and optimize the interaction networks of healthcare professionals, close gaps in continuous obesity care, accelerate early Alzheimer's treatment with EHR-integrated AI agents, and uncover dangerous drug-drug and drug-gene interactions.
Two pillars
Clinical pathways, care-team networks, and patient trajectories — learned from the digital footprints of care and returned to clinicians as decision support.
Knowledge graphs and graph neural networks that predict adverse drug interactions and surface new therapeutic candidates from biobank-scale data.
How we work
Recognition
The highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding early-career scientists and engineers, awarded to lab director You Chen in 2024. Read the story →
Product
Obesity and weight-management care in one place — tracking, organization, and AI-supported insights, born from our human-AI obesity-care research.
Teaching
Every fall at Vanderbilt (BMIF 7391 / CS 5891 / CS 3891) — from the foundations of network analysis to graph neural networks, Graph RAG, and biomedical foundation models.
Join us
Funded positions across our NIH and Eli Lilly projects. We care more about how you think than which tools you already know.
Multiple funded positions in agentic AI and reinforcement learning for healthcare delivery, across five areas: next-day hospital discharge, repairing healthcare team structure, Alzheimer's care pathway optimization, chronic care pathway optimization, and biomedical knowledge discovery. Rolling review, flexible start dates.
We advise students in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt. Funded positions are available through our active NIH and industry projects, and our students publish first-author work in AMIA, JAMIA, KDD, and clinical journals.