Dr. Chen has taught the lab's signature course at Vanderbilt University every fall since 2021 — evolving from Network Analysis in Healthcare into today's Network Analysis and Graph AI in Healthcare.
Fall 2026
Network analysis has become a pivotal tool in healthcare, offering powerful methods to extract meaningful insights from vast and complex healthcare data. This course provides an overview of the field from its historical foundations to the current frontier of graph AI — node embeddings, graph neural networks, graph transformers, knowledge graphs with graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (Graph RAG), and biomedical foundation models. It emphasizes perspectives from data mining, machine learning, and statistics, and it grounds every method in real healthcare applications.
Introducing the foundational and modern (graph AI) concepts of network analysis and their relevance to healthcare, across 22 chapters in five parts — from simple networks and graphs to graph machine learning.
Presentations on published research, delivered together with each group's initial project proposal.
Team projects applying network analysis and graph AI to real-world healthcare problems.
Understand the history and foundational concepts of network analysis and formalize a healthcare problem as a graph; apply classic network metrics — centrality, community detection, motifs, and generative models; and progress through the full arc of graph AI and its healthcare applications.
Course numbers: BMIF 7391 / CS 5891 / CS 3891
Instructor: You Chen, PhD (you.chen@vanderbilt.edu)
Teaching assistant: Yubo Feng (yubo.feng@vanderbilt.edu)
When & where: Tuesdays & Thursdays, Featheringill Hall, Fall 2026
Office hours: upon appointment
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