We are actively recruiting PhD students, and we welcome inquiries from prospective postdoctoral fellows, rotation students, and undergraduate researchers.
Open positions
Our PhD students work on projects at the intersection of AI and healthcare: human-centered, multimodal, and agentic AI for healthcare delivery (clinical pathway optimization, discharge prediction, care-team network analysis from EHR audit logs) and graph AI and foundation models for drug safety, drug repurposing, and therapeutic discovery (knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, large language models, pharmacogenetics with biobank-scale data). Students publish in venues such as KDD, JAMA Network Open, JAMIA, and Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.
A strong foundation in machine learning, network/graph analysis, data mining, large-scale data analysis, or statistics — and the discipline and motivation to pursue independent research in computer science, engineering, or biomedical informatics.
Apply to the PhD programs in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt, and name Dr. You Chen as a potential advisor.
Email you.chen@vanderbilt.edu with your CV, transcripts, a brief statement of research interests, and (if available) representative publications or code.
Other opportunities
We welcome inquiries from prospective postdoctoral fellows with experience in machine learning, network analysis, LLMs/agents, or real-world health data. Send a CV, a research statement, and contact information for three references to you.chen@vanderbilt.edu.
The lab has a long track record of mentoring rotation students, undergraduate summer interns, and even high-school researchers — many of whom have published first-author papers from their time with us. See our alumni for examples, and reach out by email with your interests and availability.