Milestone
Jun 2026
Passed my dissertation proposal defense and am now all-but-dissertation (ABD), expected to graduate in June 2027.
Jia Xu
Ph.D. Candidate in Computational Medicine · Northeastern University
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Medicine at Northeastern University, and I build trustworthy, human-centered AI for healthcare. My research connects multimodal clinical data (EHRs, medical imaging, clinical notes, and wearable data) with large language models. I passed my dissertation proposal defense in June 2026 and am now ABD, expecting to graduate in June 2027. Previously, I was a graduate researcher at Shen Lab, Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, University of Pennsylvania.
News
Summer School
Jun 2026
Attended the Machine Learning Ph.D. Summer School hosted by Columbia University × Bloomberg (Jun 15–26).
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May 2026
Presented “Attention-enhanced ensemble learning achieves robust detection of referable diabetic retinopathy across heterogeneous fundus image sources” at the ARVO 2026 Annual Meeting, Denver (May 2–7).
Conference -
Dec 2025
Received a research grant from Thinking Machines Lab to support my work on AI for healthcare.
Grant -
Aug 2025
Passed the Ph.D. candidacy exam and became a Ph.D. candidate.
Milestone -
Jul 2025
Presented “MentalChat16K: A Benchmark Dataset for Conversational Mental Health Assistance” as an oral at KDD ’25 (pp. 5367–5378).
Oral -
2025
MentalChat16K is among the most-downloaded mental-health datasets on Hugging Face, peaking at 8.1k+ downloads a month.
Dataset -
Feb 2025
Won 1st place at the MEXA Mental Health Intervention × AI Hackathon, organized by Wellcome Trust and Google DeepMind.
Award -
Jan 2025
“Modeling the impact of socioeconomic disparity, biological markers and environmental exposures on phenotypic age using mediation analysis and structural equation models” was published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics (Vol. 193, 105661).
Journal -
Nov 2024
Presented “MentalGPT: Harnessing AI for Compassionate Mental Health Support” (podium) at the AMIA 2024 Annual Symposium in San Francisco (Nov 9–13).
Conference -
2024
“Identifying biological markers and sociodemographic factors that influence the gap between phenotypic and chronological ages” was published in Informatics for Health and Social Care (Vol. 49, pp. 162–176). Paper
Journal -
Sep 2024
Started my Ph.D. in Computational Medicine at Northeastern University.
Milestone