About

Dr. Zifeng Wang works on AI4AI and recursive self-improvement for science. His research connects scientific agents with verifiers and world models so AI systems can propose ideas, test them against reliable feedback, and improve. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His earlier work spans biomedical AI and clinical research, with publications in NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACL, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Nature Communications. He has also translated AI-agent research into products for biotech, pharmaceutical, hospital, and CRO partners.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2021–2025
- Advisor: Jimeng Sun.
- Committee: Zhiyong Lu, Jiawei Han, Hanghang Tong, Sheng Wang.
M.S., Data Science, Tsinghua University, 2018–2021
- Advisors: Shao-Lun Huang & Khalid M. Mosalam.
B.S., Engineering, Tongji University, 2014–2018

Working Experience

Former Cofounder & Chief AI Scientist, Keiji.AI (joined May 2025).
Research Intern, AWS, Amazon, May–Aug. 2023.
- Topic: AI for Drug Discovery.
- Mentor: Zichen Wang.
Research Intern, Medidata, Dassault Systèmes, Feb–May 2023.
- Topic: Synthetic Data Generation for Clinical Trials.
- Mentor: Mandis Beigi.
Research Intern, Amplitude, May–Aug. 2022.
- Topic: Multi-treatment Causal Inference.
- Mentor: Cao Xiao.
Research Intern, Jarvis Lab, Tencent, Dec. 2019 – Jun. 2021.
- Topics: Graph DL for Clinical Diagnosis; Lifelong Learning Diagnostic AI; Information-theoretic DL.
- Mentor: Yefeng Zheng.

Honors & Awards

Included in Elsevier's Top 2% Scientists list
2024 Research featured by NIH: AI algorithm matches potential volunteers to clinical trials
2023 Yee Memorial Fellowship, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 NeurIPS Scholar Award, Neural Information Processing Systems Conference
2022 Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2021 Best Student Paper Award, Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD)

Service

Area Chair: COLM (2026).
Program Committee / Reviewer: NeurIPS (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), EMNLP (2022, 2023), IJCAI (2022, 2023, 2024), AAAI (2022, 2024, 2025), NAACL (2024), COLM (2024, 2025), ICLR (2024, 2025), ICML (2025), ACL (2023), KDD (2023), NLPCC (2024).
Journal Reviewer: Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, npj Digital Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Bioinformatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ACM Computing Surveys.
Co-host of the AI for Health Webinar.

Teaching Experience

Spring 2022, TA for CS598 Deep Learning for Healthcare at UIUC, given by Prof. Jimeng Sun.
Summer 2020, TA for Optimization Models and Applications, given by Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui.
Spring 2020, TA for Bayesian Learning and Data Analysis, given by Prof. Ercan E. Kuruoglu.
Fall 2019, TA for Learning from Data, given by Prof. Yang Li.