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 focuses on developing AI systems for healthcare, with emphasis on large language models, agentic AI, clinical informatics, personalized medicine, tool/retrieval-augmented learning, reasoning, and data-centric AI. I received my Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Dr. May D. Wang.
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 Received the Google Gemini Academic Program Award ($10,000).
- 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 Received the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award.
- 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
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! 🏆🔥💪