Jeongwook “Luke” Yun, a senior in The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Biomedical Engineering, is being recognized for his passion, dedication and transformative work involving the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and health care.
Yun was recently featured on The Austin Business Journal’s prestigious “Austin Inno Under 25” list. The annual awards recognize individuals aged 25 or younger making a difference at local startups, budding founders working to get their own companies off the ground, student entrepreneurs balancing college courses and building a startup, or individuals supporting the innovation community.
Initially, Yun and his team were building a live research coding assistant for medical research that provided tailored live-code suggestions for developing medical algorithms and the most relevant literature/research on the topic the user was working on. They took part in a start-up accelerator program called “Antler” which has less than a 1% acceptance rate.
However, with how proficient tools from large technology companies have become and the critical nature of privacy in health care, they are currently building an AI solution to test the security and privacy of medical AI models before and after they are implemented into health care systems.
1. What is your current involvement with AI?
I have worked as a medical AI researcher at Harvard Medical School/Dana Farber Cancer Institute for nearly two years, working remotely on various models for early pancreatic cancer detection with AI.
2. Describe some of your previous experiences.
During the summer of my junior year, I was an AI Medical Affairs intern at Pfizer in New York City where I developed AI algorithms for sentiment analysis of Pfizer's drugs from social media. During the summer of my sophomore year, I was a Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence intern at Merck in New Jersey where I conducted research on the personality and biases of large language models. I also did research at NYU School of Global Public Health where I explored discrimination in health care settings. During the summer of my freshman year, I was a process engineering intern at a pharmaceutical startup called QuVa Pharma in Houston where I worked on automating warehouse data pipelines.
3. Do you have any extracurricular activities that you enjoy?
Throughout my time at UT Austin, I was a member of the Beta Upsilon Chi fraternity, a volunteer at UT Student Engineers Educating Kids, and I recently founded and am serving as president of Texas Health AI where we get UT undergraduates to work with local Austin health care systems on AI projects.
4. What made you decide you wanted to major in biomedical engineering?
Coming into college, I wanted to work in the medical space due to the large, immediate impact that medicine can have on someone. This desire combined with my interests for math and technology, especially computers and artificial intelligence, pushed me to choose biomedical engineering as my major. I believed that learning hands-on skills of programming and hardware would give me the ability to create practical products that helped improve patient diagnosis, care and outcomes. Technology is a core component of health care, and I had a strong conviction that understanding technology at a deeper level would allow me to leverage tools more effectively and to generate practical ideas towards improving various aspects of health care. Biomedical engineering's essence of intersecting technology and biology provided me an opportunity to lay a solid foundation towards my goals of becoming a world leader and expert in health care technology
5. What are your plans for after graduation?
I will be building a startup that addresses critical needs in the medical AI infrastructure space in Silicon Valley. There are a plethora of companies developing amazing, cutting-edge tools for health care, but there is a shortage of services that lay down the infrastructure foundations to support the medical AI space which is just beginning. I will continue to be a part of the research I am currently doing at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford. All of this will be in preparation for my future in the long term but also for my short-term goal of matriculating into medical school in two years.
WRITTEN BY JOSHUA KLEINSTREUER
