BIOGRAPHY

Christopher C. Yang is a professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. He also has a courtesy appointment at the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow. He is currently on leave and serving as the program director in the Division of Intelligent and Information Systems (IIS) of Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at National Science Foundation. Before his leave, he was the Founding Director of Data Science Programs and the Program Director of MS in Health Informatics. His research interest includes data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, healthcare informatics, social media analytics, electronic commerce, and intelligence and security informatics. He has over 380 publications in top-tier journals, conferences, and books, such as ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Transaction on Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, PLOS One, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and more. He has received over $11M research fundings from NSF, NIH, DoD, PCORI, HK RGC, etc.
He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research and Electronic Commerce Research and Application. He is the editor of the CRC book series on Healthcare Informatics and the founding steering committee chair of the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics. He has been the general chair of over 5 conferences and program chairs of over 10 conferences.
He is widely recognized for his contributions to biomedical and healthcare informatics, especially in detecting adverse drug reactions, uncovering opportunities for drug repurposing, and advancing explainable and fair AI for healthcare prediction. His innovations have been translated into industry practice through partnerships and contract research with several pharmaceutical companies, with software directly supporting new drug development. These collaborations, along with his consulting work and the launch of companies built on his research, highlight the substantial impact of his work on the biomedical and pharmaceutical sectors.
He is the director of the Healthcare Informatics Research Lab. His recent research includes large language models, explainable AI, multimodal learning, predictive modeling for prostate cancer, pharmacovigilance, drug repositioning, modeling of disengagement driving for injury prevention, heterogeneous network mining, distributed graph computing, health intervention through social media for substance use disorders, and social network analytics.