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MU’s Cheng named top 100 AI researcher in healthcare

September 17, 2019

Jianlin Chen supervises two people in a classroom.

Mizzou Engineering Professor Jianlin Cheng is one of the best in the world at using AI to improve healthcare outcomes according to Deep Knowledge Analytics (DKA).

There has never been a more important time to uncover new ways that artificial intelligence can improve our health.

Researchers around the world are using high-powered computing to uncover new drugs, improve personalized medicine and predict potential health issues before they happen. Being great in this field can help save lives.

Mizzou Engineering Professor Jianlin Cheng is one of the best in the world at using AI to improve healthcare outcomes according to Deep Knowledge Analytics (DKA).

DKA recently announced its list of the “Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare,” and Cheng’s stellar work in developing cutting-edge machine learning methods of protein structure prediction important for drug design and precision medicine made him one of the world’s foremost researchers in this area.

The list includes researchers from various educational institutions worldwide, as well as tech companies such as Google and Landing AI and pharmaceutical giants GSK, Roche, Merck and more. Cheng was the only selection from Missouri and one of just a handful from the Midwest.

“I am very humbled to represent Mizzou and Columbia, Mo., on that list,” Cheng, William and Nancy Thompson Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, said.

Selections of top 100 AI leaders in the field were based on information gleaned from a variety of sources, including top pharmaceutical and healthcare AI conference lists, Google Scholar citations, news distribution services, ResearchGate score, number of journal articles published and more. Academic researchers were graded on four criteria:

  • Number of peer-reviewed publication
  • Number and frequency of citations
  • Leadership in a specific area of theoretical or engineering machine learning or artificial intelligence in the field of drug discovery
  • Notable theoretical breakthroughs, technical inventions or widely-adopted commercial models

“Many researchers are accomplishing great science using artificial intelligence and biomedical informatics. This is really incredible,” Cheng said.