Degui Zhi, PhD, is founding chair of the Department of bioinformatics and systems medicine, the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics (MSBMI) at UTHealth Houston, formerly UTHealth Houston School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI). He is the Glassell Family Professor and founding director of Center for AI and Genome Informatics (AIGI). He received his PhD in bioinformatics at UC San Diego. Before joining UTHealth, he was a tenured associate professor of statistical genetics at University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Dr. Zhi is interested in developing AI deep learning and informatics methods for biomedical big data. His team develops multiple generalist deep learning frameworks for the modeling of biobank-scale biomedical data. Recent works from the lab includes Med-BERT, a clinical foundation model for structured clinical data, gene2vec, a distributed representation embedding model for genes based their co-expression patterns, and several unsupervised deep learning models for deriving endophenotypes from imaging data for genetic discovery. His team also developed advanced PBWT-based data structures and algorithms for population genetics informatics.

His methodological research has been funded by multiple PI/MPI grants totaling over $20 million. His current funded projects cover topics in AI-powered brain imaging and retina imaging genetics, population genetics informatics, and EHR predictive modeling. He is also interested in using LLM and generative AI for scientific discovery. He has been teaching the first deep learning course at the Texas Medical Center since 2018. Dr. Zhi is an elected fellow of American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).