Wenqi Shi
Tenure-Track Assistant Professor
Peter O'Donnell Jr. School of Public Health, UT Southwestern Medical Center
I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Health Data Science and Biostatistics at UT Southwestern Medical Center. I am also a faculty member of the Quantitative Biomedical Research Center (QBRC), the Clinical Informatics Center (CIC), and a graduate faculty of the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Graduate Program.
My research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare. I develop agentic large language model systems—integrating search, tools, multimodal clinical data, and verification pipelines—to enable transparent, safe, and auditable AI in clinical settings. I collaborate closely with clinicians to design, evaluate, and deploy AI-enabled decision support for precision and personalized medicine. Before joining UTSW, I received my Ph.D. from Bio-Medical Informatics and Bioimaging Lab (Bio-MIBLab) at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Dr. May D. Wang, in 2024.
Openings
I am actively looking for Ph.D. students and Postdoctoral researchers to join my group. I am open to discussing research opportunities with motivated students who have strong backgrounds in machine learning and/or health informatics. Please reach out only if you are ready to devote time and effort in a research project. If interested, please email me at wenqi.shi@utsouthwestern.edu with your CV and a brief description of your research interests.
News
- Mar 2026 Our tutorial on "Large Language Models and Agentic AI for Biomedical Informatics" has been accepted at ISMB 2026.
- Mar 2026 Our tutorial on multi-agent language model systems has been accepted at ACL 2026.
- Feb 2026 Grateful to receive the Google Gemini Academic Program Award ($10,000). Thank you Google for supporting our research!
- Jan 2026 Our paper "MedAgentGym" has been accepted at ICLR 2026 as an Oral presentation (top 1.18%).
- Jan 2026 Paper accepted at CVPR 2026 on scaling agentic reinforcement learning for tool-integrated reasoning in VLMs.
- Jan 2026 Best Paper Award at AI4Research Workshop at AAAI 2026 for CellForge.
- Dec 2025 Our paper "AceSearcher" has been accepted at NeurIPS 2025 as a Spotlight (top 3.2%).
- Oct 2025 Grateful to receive the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award. Thank you NVIDIA for supporting our research!
- Dec 2024 Joined UT Southwestern Medical Center as a tenure-track assistant professor.
Education
Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Dr. May D. Wang, Bio-Medical Informatics and Bio-Imaging Laboratory (Bio-MIB Lab)
B.S. in Information Science and Technology
Advisor: Dr. Libao Zhang, Geoscience and Remote Sensing Lab
Misc
- 🐱 In my spare time, I mainly stay with my four cats — they are the real bosses of the house! 🐾🐾🐾🐾
- 🎮 Passionate Dota 2 enjoyer. Huge fan of Ame, XXS, and Team XG! GG go next! 🏆🔥💪