Trustworthy, human-centered AI for health

Congning Ni Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

I develop AI methods that connect health data and human communication to improve caregiving, risk detection, and trustworthy clinical decision support.

Research

Connecting data, language, and care

Three connected areas shape my research program.

01

Caregiver support and communication

Characterizing caregiver needs and designing AI tools that help people organize concerns, prepare questions, and navigate longitudinal care.

  • ADRD caregiver narratives and online communities
  • Peer, clinician, and AI response comparison
  • Caregiver-facing copilots and retrieval-augmented systems

02

Clinical risk and multimodal evidence

Integrating EHRs, clinical notes, patient-reported data, and other longitudinal signals to identify care-related risks earlier.

  • Cancer medication discontinuation
  • Structured and unstructured clinical data integration
  • Interpretable prediction and evidence characterization

03

Trustworthy LLMs for healthcare

Evaluating and aligning large language models so they behave safely, transparently, and consistently in sensitive health settings.

  • Hallucination, omission, and factual grounding
  • Clinical summarization and preference alignment
  • Mental health and patient-facing AI evaluation

Research in progress

Ongoing work

Active research threads that are still evolving and are not represented as current submissions.

Active development

Agentic concept learning for interpretable clinical prediction

Developing auditable concept-learning methods for longitudinal clinical text, with an emphasis on interpretable prediction and traceable evidence.

Clinical NLP Agentic AI Interpretability Longitudinal EHR

Publications

Selected work

Published, accepted, and ongoing research, with public links when available.

Last updated August 11, 2026

In review

Current manuscripts

Venue details are withheld when appropriate during peer review

Research & professional activities

Beyond publications

Selected talks, presentations, and research highlights.

Academic service

Service to the research community

Selected reviewing and program service across computing and health informatics communities.

Conference & community reviewing

Peer review

ACL Rolling Review · ACM CHI · ICWSM · The Web Conference · ICTAI

Program committee

ACM Web Science

Regular-paper Program Committee member, 2023–2024.

Journal reviewing

Biomedical & health informatics

Review service for JMIR publications and related health-informatics research.

Background

Appointments and education

2025–Present

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

2024

Doctoral Research Intern

American Institutes for Research, Institute of Education Sciences

2020–2025

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Vanderbilt University

2018–2019

M.E. in Computer Engineering

Vanderbilt University

2014–2018

B.S. in Computer Science

Donghua University