Spotlight: Doctoral Dissertation Fellow Zaifu Zhan
Zaifu Zhan was recently awarded the Graduate School’s 2025-2026 doctoral dissertation fellowship (DDF). Working under the guidance of Professor Rui Zhang (Chief, Division of Computational Health Sciences, University of Minnesota Medical School), Zhan is developing large language models (LLMs) methods for efficient and accurate natural language processing (NLP) in biomedical settings. Biomedical knowledge often exists in text, as clinical notes, scientific articles, drug labels, and other forms. Although critical for research and patient care, their unstructured and terminology-heavy nature make it difficult to operationalize at scale for information extraction and summarization. Zhan’s goal is to make high-performing models practical under constraints such as limited compute, privacy requirements, and the need for output that is grounded in evidence. Zhan’s research could support accurate decision making in healthcare settings (hospitals and/or research) and offer NLP systems that are not only accurate but also cost-effective, traceable, and easier to maintain.
Learn more about Zhan’s research
Learn more about Zhan and what inspires him
Zaifu Zhan earned his master’s degree from Tsinghua University and his bachelor’s degree from Beijing Jiaotong University, both in electrical engineering. His research interests lie in advancing artificial intelligence technologies and applying them to biomedical domains, with the goal of building capable and practical AI systems for real-world healthcare applications. He is particularly interested in key biomedical tasks such as information extraction, question answering, disease diagnosis, and retrieval. Presently, his work leads in three directions: agentic AI where he develops LLM-based agent systems, enhancing reasoning in LLMs, and efficient and scalable LLMs.
His inspiration
“My motivation to pursue this area of research comes from witnessing the transformative impact of AI on everyday life. I am drawn to conducting impactful research that not only advances AI as a field, but also creates tangible benefits for society. In particular, I see biomedicine as a domain where AI can make a meaningful difference, as it is closely connected to people’s health and well-being. I am especially interested in exploring how AI can accelerate progress in medicine and improve the accessibility and effectiveness of healthcare. I am also deeply grateful to my advisor, Rui Zhang, whose guidance has been instrumental in shaping my research direction, providing detailed guidance, and helping me recognize the significance of AI for medicine.”
Plans after graduation
“My plan is to become a researcher, academia or an industry research lab, developing deployable, trustworthy, powerful language model technologies.”