Dr. Ruogu Fang joined VINSE in fall 2026 as a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Flowers Family Endowed Dean鈥檚 Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Her research brings together artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and biomedical imaging to advance precision brain health and develop AI systems inspired by the brain.
Dr. Fang earned her B.S. in Information Engineering from Zhejiang University and her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. She directs the Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation (SMILE) Laboratory, where her group develops multimodal AI methods that integrate neuroimaging, retinal imaging, electronic health records, genomics, and other biomedical data. Her research aims to enable earlier detection of neurodegenerative diseases, predict individual disease progression and treatment response, and guide personalized interventions, including brain stimulation. In 2026, she was named a Victor J. Dzau Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholar by the National Academy of Medicine.
Alongside these biomedical applications, Dr. Fang investigates how principles of brain function and learning can inform more trustworthy and adaptive AI. Her interdisciplinary approach creates opportunities for collaboration across the VINSE community, including applying AI to complex imaging and sensing data and connecting computational methods with emerging biomedical technologies. We are excited to welcome Dr. Fang to VINSE and look forward to the perspectives and collaborations she will bring to our community.