 Yanjun Gao
| Title | Assistant Professor |
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| Institution | University of Colorado Denver - Anschutz Medical Campus |
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| Department | SOM-BIOMED Informatics Gen Ops |
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 Biography | Penn State University, State College, PA | PhD | 08/2021 | Computer Science | | University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI | Postdoc | 08/2024 | Clinical Informatics and Health AI |
Overview Dr. Yanjun Gao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She leads the Language, Reasoning, and Knowledge (LARK) Lab, where her research focuses on developing and evaluating foundational natural language processing (NLP) methods, particularly large language models (LLMs), for healthcare applications. With expertise spanning computer science, NLP, and healthcare informatics, Dr. Gao’s work aims to transform complex data, such as electronic health records (EHRs), into actionable insights to improve decision-making and patient outcomes. Her broader vision is to ensure AI systems are safe, trustworthy, and effectively aligned with human needs.
Bibliographic
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Henry K, Xu S, Blotske K, Cargile M, Barreto EF, Murray B, Smith S, Bauer SR, Zhao X, Tilley A, Gao Y, Liu T, Sohn S, Sikora A. Performance evaluation of a large language model for medication management tasks. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 2026 Sep 10. PMID: 42717660.
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Stonbraker S, Curet BN, Mayorga S, Francis B, Caraballo PB, Castro YE, Halpern M, Rael CT, Giano Z, Cetin B, Kazgan M, Seidlitz A, Gao Y, Cato K, Hawkins KL, McLees MP, Gardner EM, Sanabria G, Schnall R, George M, Arcia A, Bakken S. Bilingual infographics improve clinical communication and health outcomes among Latino persons with HIV: A multi-site mixed methods study with a randomized controlled trial. Patient Educ Couns. 2026 Sep 07; 153:109859. PMID: 42735516.
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Tilley A, Murray B, Henry K, Zhao X, Gao Y, Blotske K, Sikora A. Navigating uncertainty matters: Evaluating large language models for drug-drug interaction identification. J Manag Care Spec Pharm. 2026 Sep; 32(9):1076-1089. PMID: 42640124.
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Henry K, Blotske K, Smith B, Li T, Gao Y, Zhao X, Liu T, Sikora A. Proposed Context-of-Use Evaluation Framework for Medication Management Tasks Completed by Generative Artificial Intelligence. medRxiv. 2026 Jun 29. PMID: 42428122.
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Blotske K, Zhao X, Henry K, Murray B, Gao Y, Smith SE, Wayne N, Ku P, Smith B, Moua S, Sikora A. Don't stop the heart: a performance analysis of large language models and potassium dosing. medRxiv. 2026 Jun 04. PMID: 42282198.
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Henry K, Smith B, Zhao X, Blotske K, Murray B, Gao Y, Smith SE, Barreto EF, Bauer S, Sohn S, Liu T, Bennett T, Cohen M, Abdulnour RE, Sikora A. Drug or Pokémon? An analysis of the ability of large language models to discern fabricated medications. medRxiv. 2026 Jan 13. PMID: 41646757.
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Cheng H, Wu Y, Khatwani S, Kruse M, Dligach D, Miller TA, Afshar M, Gao Y. Scaling Biomedical Knowledge Graph Retrieval for Interpretable Reasoning: Applications to Clinical Diagnosis Prediction. medRxiv. 2026 Jan 13. PMID: 41646767.
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Zhao X, Blotske K, Cargile M, Tilley A, Murray B, Gao Y, Henry K, Smith SE, Barreto EF, Bauer S, Sohn S, Liu T, Bennett T, Cohen M, Sikora A. Rx-LLM: a benchmarking suite to evaluate safe large language model performance for medication-related tasks. medRxiv. 2025 Dec 30. PMID: 41404284.
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Blotske K, Zhao X, Henry K, Gao Y, Tilley A, Cargile M, Murray B, Smith SE, Barreto EF, Bauer S, Sohn S, Liu T, Bennett T, Cohen M, Sikora A. Drug-drug interaction identification using large language models. medRxiv. 2025 Dec 29. PMID: 41503479.
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Kruse M, Afshar M, Khatwani S, Mayampurath A, Chen G, Gao Y. Simple Yet Effective: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Multi-LLM Uncertainty Quantification. Proc Conf Empir Methods Nat Lang Process. 2025 Nov; 2025:30481-30492. PMID: 41399801.
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Kruse M, Hu S, Derby N, Wu Y, Stonbraker S, Yao B, Wang D, Goldberg E, Gao Y. Large Language Models with Temporal Reasoning for Longitudinal Clinical Summarization and Prediction. Find ACL EMNLP. 2025 Nov; 2025:20715-20735. PMID: 41399802.
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Gao Y, Li R, Croxford E, Caskey J, Patterson BW, Churpek M, Miller T, Dligach D, Afshar M. Leveraging Medical Knowledge Graphs Into Large Language Models for Diagnosis Prediction: Design and Application Study. JMIR AI. 2025 Feb 24; 4:e58670. PMID: 39993309.
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Gao Y, Myers S, Chen S, Dligach D, Miller T, Bitterman DS, Chen G, Mayampurath A, Churpek MM, Afshar M. Uncertainty estimation in diagnosis generation from large language models: next-word probability is not pre-test probability. JAMIA Open. 2025 Feb; 8(1):ooae154. PMID: 39802674.
This graph shows the total number of publications by year, by first, middle/unknown, or last author.
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| Year | Publications |
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| 2025 | 6 | | 2026 | 7 |
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