Short Biography of Professor Li Shen at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Li Shen is a Professor of Informatics and the Interim Director of the Informatics Division in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. He holds secondary appointments in the Department of Radiology and the Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS), and faculty appointments in the following graduate groups: Applied Math and Computational Science (AMCS), Bioengineering (BioEng), Computer and Information Science (CIS), Epidemiology and Biostatistics (GGEB), Genomics and Computational Biology (GCB), and Neuroscience (NGG). He is a Senior Fellow at the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He serves as the Associate Director for Bioinformatics at the IBI, the Faculty Director of the IBI Bioinformatics Core, and Co-Director of the Penn Center For AI And Data Science For Integrated Diagnostics (AI2D).

Dr. Shen obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. He is a pioneer in bioinformatics strategies for brain-wide genome-wide association studies to advance Alzheimer’s disease research. His research spans artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), biomedical and health informatics, NLP/LLMs, medical image computing, network science, and multi-omics and systems biology, with applications across complex disorders. He has authored over 430 peer-reviewed articles in these fields. His work has been continuously supported by the NIH and NSF. His primary focus is on developing and applying advanced AI/ML/Informatics methods to analyze large-scale biobank and health datasets, aiming to advance the understanding, early detection, treatment, and prevention of complex disorders, while promoting overall human health and care delivery. He also explores emerging frontiers such as generative AI, agentic AI, and trustworthy multimodal AI to push the boundaries of biomedical research.

Dr. Shen has served on a variety of scientific journal editorial boards, grant review committees, and organizing committees of professional meetings in medical image computing and biomedical informatics. He served as the Executive Director of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society between 2016 and 2019. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a distinguished contributor of the IEEE Computer Society.