Fei He Named Outstanding Doctoral Student in EECS

 

Posted May 09, 2025

 

Digital Biology Lab is proud to announce that our member, Fei He, has been named the 2025 Outstanding Doctoral Student in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Fei joined our lab in Spring 2023 as a Graduate Research Assistant and is currently a Ph.D. candidate under the mentorship of Dr. Dong Xu. His research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and life sciences, with a particular focus on developing interdisciplinary methodologies that leverage AI and foundation models to address critical challenges in biology and biomedicine.

Recently, Fei has concentrated on enhancing the performance and efficiency of single-cell large language models in out-of-distribution scenarios such as unseen diseases, novel treatments, uncharacterized cell populations, and cross-species applications. In addition to his contributions in single-cell research, he has developed multi-modal approaches that integrate textual and visual data from biomedical literature to extract gene interactions and support both disease and plant biology studies.

These efforts have culminated in the development of several impactful computational tools and platforms, including scPEFT, pathCLIP, FatPlants, and MuSite, in collaboration with internal and external labs. His work has facilitated advanced data mining and knowledge discovery in the life sciences, resulting in 12 publications (including 1 under submission), with 8 led as first author or co-corresponding author.

Beyond his research contributions, Fei is actively engaged in the academic community. He has presented at major conferences such as the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2024) in Houston, TX, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2023 Annual Symposium in New Orleans, LA, and the 8th Workshop on Biostatistics and Bioinformatics (2023) in Atlanta, GA. He was also selected to attend the Computational Genomics Summer Institute 2023 at UCLA. His accomplishments have been recognized through four Student and Trainee Travel Awards from ICIBM 2024, EECS 2024, the LSC Postdoc, Graduate, and Undergraduate Association (2023), and the Interdisciplinary Plant Group (2023).