Kevin W. Jin

Hello there! I'm a second-year PhD student in the Interdepartmental Program in Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics at Yale University. I am a member of the Clinical NLP Lab, a group in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. I am grateful and fortunate to be advised by Hua Xu.

As a data scientist in training, I have diverse academic interests across the emergent field of biomedical informatics¹, but I concentrate on digital psychiatry: investigating mental health with computational and statistical methods.

I was born and partially raised in Dallas, TX but spent much of my childhood in Beijing, China. I returned to Dallas to finish high school and left for Baltimore, MD for my undergraduate work, completing a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology at Johns Hopkins University in 2020. I returned to Dallas once again and underwent a career transition from a pre-medical track to biomedical informatics. This involved the completion of quantitative coursework and dual full-time research assistant positions at the University of Texas at Dallas in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and UT Southwestern Medical Center in the Quantitative Biomedical Research Center. My research experience spans the biophysical properties of cancer, molecular radiation oncology, microfluidic single-cell analysis, statistical shape analysis, and clinical natural language processing.

Outside of research, I'm passionately invested in global affairs (particularly East Asian geopolitics) and military history. My favorite publications are The Economist, The New Yorker, Reuters, The Associated Press, BBC News, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and Nikkei Asia. I also follow the work of the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ways that I add flavor to my life include reading a truly inordinate amount of news, studying languages², baking desserts and cooking way too much Italian/Japanese/Chinese food³, as well as sparring with other shinai-wielding fanatics at the Yale Kendo Club⁴. I'm also active in the Yale Graduate Consulting Club, the Yale Biotech Club, the Yale Japanese American Student Union, and the Yale Chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society.

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News & Highlights

• June 2024: Preliminary work on my first project for Xu Lab has been accepted as a late-breaking poster abstract by the Computational Psychiatry conference, held this year the University of Minnesota. I will present my poster, "Evaluating large language models for complex diagnostic reasoning in clinical psychiatry", at the conference from July 15-18. See you in Minneapolis!
• May 2024: My home department, Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, has officially transitioned from a Section to a Department under the steady stewardship of our chair Lucila Ohno-Machado.
• April 2024: I've officially joined the Xu Lab in the Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale School of Medicine!
• August 2023: After moving from Dallas to New Haven, I've begun my PhD in Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics at Yale University!
• June 2023: One astonishing year later, I have completed two transformative research experiences under Prof. Qiwei Li at The University of Texas at Dallas and Prof. Guanghua Xiao at UT Southwestern Medical Center. I express my heartfelt gratitude to all of my mentors and friends for the incredible opportunities.

Research Interests

• Clinical large language models for psychiatry: I am interested in developing and applying clinical large language models to clinical text data to improve our understanding of mental health conditions and their treatment.
• Wearable data analysis for psychiatry: I currently investigate psychiatric associations within wearable device data provided by large databanks, such as the NIH All of Us Research Program, and the UK BioBank.

Collaborators

• Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD
• McLean Hospital
• Director, Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics
• Scientific Director, McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry
• Harvard Medical School
• Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Selected Publications and Conference Proceedings

For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar profile.

Talks, Workshops, & Lectures

July 2024: Despite a worldwide cybersecurity outage of nearly apocalyptic proportions, Computational Psychiatry 2024 was a rousing success! I presented my poster, "Evaluating large language models for complex diagnostic reasoning in clinical psychiatry", to much interest from attendees. Proud to represent BIDS and Xu Lab at the University of Minnesota!

April 2024: I delivered a talk on modeling psychiatric phenotypes from wearable accelerometer data derived from the UK BioBank for the Bridging GAPS Diversity in STEM Symposium at Yale! This work was conducted as part of my research rotation through Mark Gerstein's lab in my first year.

March 2024: I led a workshop on utilizing McCleary, a high-performance computing cluster operated by the Yale Center for Research Computing. This was the second of four workshops in the From Milliliters to Megabytes (M2M): Intro to Data Management and Computing Series, organized by the Yale BBS Diversity and Inclusion Collective. Slides here. The audience was comprised of graduate students and medical students of all backgrounds. We had a full room (approx. 30 in attendance) and around 10 on Zoom!

Footnotes

Last Updated: July 24, 2024 Site Template