You Chen, PhD, FAMIA

Biography

Tenured Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Affiliated Appointments: Computer Science; Electrical and Computer Engineering, Vanderbilt University

You Chen is a biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence researcher whose work centers on AI for health: building AI systems that improve how healthcare is delivered, and that accelerate biomedical discovery.

Google Scholar · ORCID · VUMC profile · you.chen@vanderbilt.edu

100+

Peer-reviewed publications

4,300+

Citations

31

h-index

67

i10-index

Bibliometrics from Google Scholar, September 2026.

He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Fuzhou University in 2004 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in 2010. He came to Vanderbilt University Medical Center as a research fellow in biomedical informatics in 2010, joined the faculty as a research assistant professor in 2015, became a tenure-track assistant professor in 2016, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2023.

Chen directs OHPEN Lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. His research program is supported by the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the National Institute on Aging, and Eli Lilly and Company. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and has chaired five doctoral dissertation committees.

Research

Two connected pillars.

Human-centered and agentic AI for healthcare delivery

Chen develops computational methods that learn how care is actually delivered from the digital traces clinicians leave behind — electronic health record audit logs, clinical notes, and structured records. Beginning with his NIH K99/R00 award and his first independent R01, this work showed that routine EHR use data can reveal how healthcare teams organize, communicate, and affect patient outcomes. Current projects apply foundation models, multimodal AI, graph neural networks, and human-AI collaboration to predicting next-day hospital discharge (DischargeWatch), improving continuity of obesity care, and accelerating Alzheimer's disease treatment pathways.

Graph AI and foundation models for therapeutic discovery

Chen builds methods that connect drugs, genes, proteins, diseases, adverse events, biomedical literature, multi-omics and single-cell data, and real-world clinical evidence into knowledge graphs that can be reasoned over. As multiple principal investigator of an NIH R01 in translational drug interaction and pharmacogenetics research, he has developed approaches for identifying clinically important drug-drug and drug-gene interactions and for validating severe adverse drug reactions across independent sources of evidence.

Honors

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

2024. The PECASE is the highest honor conferred by the United States government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent research careers. Chen was nominated through the National Institutes of Health.

Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association

2021. FAMIA recognizes sustained contribution to the practice of informatics and service to AMIA.

2022
Outstanding Researcher Award, Department of Biomedical Informatics, VUMC
2021
Two papers in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association featured by the Editor-in-Chief
2018
Editors' Choice, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Trauma-provider interaction patterns and length of stay
2017
Distinguished Speaker Award International Symposium on Data-driven Healthcare
2015
Editors' Choice, Journal of Biomedical Informatics Inferred phenotypic topics across EHR systems
2012
Named among the top 100 computer science articles of the year ACM Computing Reviews
2011
Best Paper Award IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics

Appointments

Associate Professor with Tenure, Biomedical Informatics 2023 – present Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering 2026 – present Affiliated appointment, Vanderbilt University
Associate Professor of Computer Science 2023 – present Affiliated appointment, Vanderbilt University
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics 2016 – 2023 Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics 2015 – 2016 Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Research Fellow in Biomedical Informatics 2010 – 2015 Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Service

Associate Editor, Smart Health 2019 – present
Editorial board, Informatics 2015 – present
Editorial board, BioMedInformatics 2020 – present
Founder and chair, First International Workshop on AI for Pharmaceutical Discovery and Development (AIPHA) 2023
Chair, Clinical Task Workgroup, national research network 2018 – 2020
Scientific program committees, AMIA Annual Symposium and AMIA Informatics Summit 2017 – present
NIH study sections and special emphasis panels

Profiles and identifiers

Canonical links to You Chen's verified academic profiles.

Contact

Department of Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
2525 West End Avenue, Suite 1416
Nashville, TN 37203

you.chen@vanderbilt.edu
you.chen@vumc.org
Phone: (615) 343-1939

Opportunities in the lab

Biography