Hoifung Poon is General Manager at Health Futures in Microsoft Research and an affiliated faculty at the University of Washington Medical School. He leads biomedical AI research and incubation, with the overarching goal of structuring medical data to optimize delivery and accelerate discovery for precision health.

His team and collaborators are among the first to explore large language models (LLMs) in health applications. His research produces popular open-source foundation models such as PubMedBERT, BioGPT, BiomedCLIP, LLaVA-Med. He has led successful research partnerships with large health providers and life science companies, creating AI systems in daily use for applications such as molecular tumor board and clinical trial matching.

He has given tutorials on these topics at top AI conferences such as ACL, AAAI, and KDD, and his prior work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards from premier AI venues such as NAACL, EMNLP, and UAI. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, specializing in machine learning and NLP.