Chunhua Weng Earns 2025 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award
for Innovation in Informatics

Chunhua Weng, Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Weng, along with this year’s other honorees, will receive her award at the AMIA 2025 Annual Symposium in Atlanta during the State of the Association meeting on Tuesday, November 18.

The Weng Lab is focused on clinical research informatics. Her lab develops novel methods to improve the efficiency and generalizability of clinical trials research, to facilitate human phenotyping using electronic 

health records data, and to automate clinical evidence computing. They invent data-driven methods to optimize the inclusiveness and safety of clinical trial eligibility criteria for COVID-19 clinical trials. They discover knowledge of common clinical trial eligibility criteria from all the studies in ClinicalTrials.gov. They discover clinical trial recruitment success factors. They develop user-friendly software tools to help clinical trialists identify eligible study cohorts in the EHR data and help patients search for clinical trial studies with minimized information overload. They advance human phenotyping using clinical text combined with the Human Phenotype Ontology. They develop neuro-symbolic methods to automate medical evidence comprehension (making PubMed computable). They collaborate closely with clinical investigators, biostatisticians, rare disease experts, and translational researchers at CUIMC and beyond.

The National Library of Medicine, the Human Genome Research Institute, FDA, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute have supported Dr. Weng’s research. Also, Dr. Weng has received several signature awards from Columbia University, including an Irving Fellowship (2007–2010), a two-phase Collaborative and Multidisciplinary Pilot Research Award (CaMPR) (2008–2010), a Columbia University Diversity Research Fellowship (2009), a Florence Irving Professorship (2010–2013), and a multidisciplinary collaborative award (2021-2022). Last year, Weng was honored as the Senior Mentor of the Year Award by the Columbia University Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

Weng is the fifth member of DBMI to be honored with the Lindberg Award, and the third in as many years. Noémie Elhadad earned the award in 2023, while Sarah Rossetti was honored in 2024. Carol Friedman (2010) and Jim Cimino (2012) are other past winners.

The Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics honors Dr. Lindberg’s continuous commitment to the field has dramatically altered the scope and extent of informatics’ practice and research. The contribution recognized will have advanced the field for example in the form of a significant innovation or a unique approach and contribution to education or training, but not for a lifetime body of work. The criteria are:

  • Awarded to an individual at any stage of a career for a specific technological, research, or educational contribution that advances biomedical informatics.
  • Adoption of the particular advance by the informatics community will be on a national or international level.
  • Scope of a successful innovation of informatics has dramatically moved or changed the field.
  • Demonstrated commitment to AMIA through membership.