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Penn AI Seminar Featuring Li Shen: Harnessing Trustworthy AI and Informatics for Dementia and Aging Research
November 4, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) remains a major health crisis with profound social and economic burdens. Innovative strategies are needed to identify genetic risk and protective factors, model disease mechanisms, and accelerate therapeutic discovery. Advances in trustworthy AI and informatics now enable the integration of multimodal genetics, omics, imaging, and outcome data from large biobanks, creating powerful opportunities for biomarker and gene discovery beyond categorical diagnoses. At the same time, generative AI and large language models (LLMs) extend these capabilities to text-rich sources such as the scientific literature, clinical notes, and caregiver narratives. When integrated with knowledge graphs, LLMs can dynamically retrieve and synthesize domain-specific knowledge.
Li Shen
Professor of Informatics and Radiology; Interim Director, Division of Informatics, Dept of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics; Associate Director for Bioinformatics, Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI); Co-Director, Center for AI and Data Science for Integrated Diagnostics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Shen is a Professor 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 Department of Radiology and Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS), and graduate group appointments in AMCS, Bioengineering, CIS, GGEB, GCB, and Neuroscience. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He serves as Associate Director for Bioinformatics at the IBI, Faculty Director of the IBI Bioinformatics Core, and Co-Director of the AI2D Center.
Dr. Shen obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. His research spans machine learning, medical image computing, biomedical and health informatics, trustworthy AI, NLP/LLMs, network science, imaging genomics, and multi-omics and systems biology, with applications to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and other complex disorders. His primary focus is on developing and applying advanced AI strategies to analyze large-scale biobank and health datasets, with the goal of advancing the understanding, early detection, treatment, prevention, and overall healthcare of complex disorders. 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 MICCAI Society (2016-2019). He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and 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.