Jie Xu, Ph.D., will join HOBI as an assistant professor in the Biomedical Informatics Division in December. She is the first faculty member to be hired at HOBI as part of UF’s AI Initiative.
Dr. Xu completed her postdoctoral research with Dr. Fei Wang and Dr. Jyotishman Pathak in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. Her research interests are in the areas of machine learning, health informatics, and the intersection of both, with a specific focus on metric learning, federated learning, and privacy-preserving techniques. She received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Xidian University in 2018. While working on her Ph.D., she studied at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Computer Science and at the University of Texas at Arlington as a joint doctoral student from 2016 to 2018.
Dr. Xu’s research lies in the intersection between data science and medicine. Her research theme is to develop integrative, fair and interpretable approaches that can effectively mine insights from big health data. This research philosophy recursively propels her research in a direction that strikes a balance between theory and application.
She has been working on developing computational algorithms for analyzing various kinds of healthcare data, including electronic health records, claims, medical imaging data, etc. One of her major research foci is patient similarity evaluation, i.e., assessing the clinical similarity between pairwise patients from their historical health records and the related health data sources.
Another research direction that she is pursuing is federated learning. Different from traditional predictive modeling approaches, which build a model based on data from a single institution, a federated learning mechanism enables the training of an algorithm across multiple decentralized edge devices or servers holding local data samples, without exchanging their data samples. It provides great promise in connecting fragmented data sources while protecting the privacy of patient data.
Dr. Xu enjoys spending time in nature and capturing all the beautiful moments with her camera. She loves cooking and baking very much, which helps reduce stress. She also loves to travel and often plans trips with friends. Whether traveling alone or with friends, every year she looks forward to exploring new places and catching up on some lifetime memories.
Dr. Xu plans to relocate to Gainesville in December. In the interim, please reach out to Eli Morris elimorris@ufl.edu if you would like to schedule a virtual introduction meeting with her via Zoom.
Welcome to HOBI, Dr. Xu!