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Lu He

Lu He, PhD

  • Assistant Professor, Health Care Informatics

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Informatics, University of California, Irvine, 2017-2023
Bachelor of Science with Distinction, Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2013-2017

Speaker Topics

Health informatics, Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Health Disparities and Inequalities

Interests and Expertise

Dr. Lu He conducts research at the intersection of health informatics, data science, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). She is passionate about developing and applying computational methods including Natural Language Processing (NLP) on various health-related data, including social media data, Electronic Health Records (EHR), and clinical notes. She has developed and applied NLP pipelines to examine the temporal trends of public attitudes and concerns toward mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic and patient concerns about healthcare service quality. She also developed NLP methods to extract clinical information such as diagnosis and performance status and social determinants of health such as environmental exposures and substance use from clinical notes of patients with rare cancer.

Her work has been published in top health informatics and HCI journals and conferences, including the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Her research has also been recognized with 4 best student paper nominations, in addition to the Editor’s Choice and Featured Article recognition of a paper published at JAMIA in 2021. Her dissertation work is supported by the prestigious Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship at UCI. She is an active member in the community, serving on the Student Editorial Board for JAMIA and as a reviewer for health informatics journals, and participating in services such as the Women in AMIA Podcast and JAMIA Journal Clubs.

Dr. Lu He is passionate about working with researchers, students, and stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to explore how to design, apply, and evaluate computational methods for health data that can achieve reliable performance, reduce biases, and ultimately help improve patient and population health.

Selected Publications

  1. Ye J*, He L*, Beestrum M. Implications for implementation and adoption of telehealth in low-and- middle income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic: systematic review of China’s practices and experiences. (* equal contribution) npj Digital Medicine 2023, Accepted
  2. He L, Yin T, Zheng K. They may not work! An evaluation of eleven sentiment analysis tools on seven social media datasets. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2022;132:104142. PMID: 35835437
  3. He L, He C. Help me #DebunkThis: unpacking individual and community’s collaborative work in information credibility assessment. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW. 2022;6. DOI: 10.1145/3555138
  4. He L*, He C*, Reynolds TL, Bai Q, Huang Y, Li C, Zheng K, Chen Y. Why do people oppose mask wearing? A comprehensive analysis of US tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of American Medical Informatics Association. 2021;28(7):1564–73. PMCID: PMC7989302 (* equal contribution) (Editor’s Choice and Featured Article)
  5. He L, Yin T, Hu Z, Chen Y, Hanauer DA, Zheng K. Developing a standardized protocol for computa- tional sentiment analysis research using health-related social media data. Journal of American Medical Informatics Association. 2021;28(6):1125–34. PMCID: PMC8200276
  6. He L*, Song T*, Jiang Y, Yu P, Song L, Gong Y. To improve supportive care for patients taking oral anticancer agents. In: Proceedings of the 2021 World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatic (MEDINFO ’21) 2021;290:547–51. PMID: 35673076 (* equal contribution)
  7. He L, He C, Wang Y, Hu Z, Zheng K, Chen Y. What do patients care about? Mining fine-grained pa- tient concerns from online physician reviews through computer-assisted multi-level qualitative analysis. American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium Proceedings. 2020;544–53. PMCID: PMC8075539 (Student Paper Competition Finalist)
  8. He L, Zheng K. How do general-purpose sentiment analyzers perform when applied to health-related online social media data? In: Proceedings of the 2019 World Congress on Health and Biomedical Infor- matics (MEDINFO ’19). 2019;1208–12. PMCID: PMC8061710 (Student Best Paper Nomination)
  9. Shehada ER, He L, Eikey EV, Jen M, Wong A, Young S, Zheng K. Characterizing frequent flyers of an emergency department using cluster analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2019 World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatics (MEDINFO ’19). 2019;158–61. PMID: 31437905

Selected awards and honors

  1. LEAD Trainee and Early Career Meeting Scholarship, American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Informatics Conference (AMIA CIC ’23), 2023
  2. Graduate Student Consortium, Natural Language Processing Working Group, American Medical Informatics Association 2022 Annual Symposium (AMIA ’22), 2022
  3. Second Place in Student Paper Competition, American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA ’22), 2022
  4. Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, Irvine, 2022
  5. Editor’s Choice of Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 2021
  6. Student Paper Competition Finalist, American Medical Informatics Association 2020 Annual Symposium (AMIA ’20), 2020
  7. Best Poster Award, The 2019 Southern California Natural Language Processing Symposium (SoCal NLP ’19), 2019
  8. Student Best Paper Nomination, The 2019 World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatics (MedInfo ’19), 2019