John H. Wu

Hello! My name is John Wu, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I work on building more robust AI applications in healthcare under the guidance of Professor Jimeng Sun. I am very fortunate to be supported by the NSF GRFP.

Prior to my Ph.D., I worked as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Das’ mathematical immunology lab, focusing on parameter estimation methods for mechanistic modeling. My work centered on two key aspects: handling noisy data regimes using the generalized method of moments and accelerating parameter estimation through parallelization and surrogate modeling with deep neural networks. Although deep learning methods often surpass mechanistic models in computational efficiency, they lack human interpretability and well-defined internal behavior. Consequently, deploying them in high-stakes applications like healthcare requires extensive testing and supervision, which can be prohibitively expensive.

While I’m deeply interested in mechanistic interpretability, I’m also actively working on improving PyHealth, a generalist healthcare AI toolkit.