Hanwen Xu
Logo Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington

I am Hanwen Xu, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, working at the intersection of generative AI and medicine, advised by Prof. Sheng Wang. Throughout My research builds large-scale multimodal foundation models that integrate pathology, radiology, and clinical records to decipher the complex cancer patient journey. I led/co-led projects such as GigaPath, GigaHeart, LLaVA-Rad and BiomedCLIP, aiming to advance multimodal AI for precision medicine and real-world clinical impact. Before my PhD, I earned a BS and MS in Department of Automation in Tsinghua University.


Education
  • University of Washington
    University of Washington
    Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
    Ph.D. Student
    Sep. 2022 - present
  • Bioinformatics Division, Tsinghua University
    Bioinformatics Division, Tsinghua University
    M.S. in Automation
    Sep. 2020 - Jul. 2022
  • Department of Automation, Tsinghua University
    Department of Automation, Tsinghua University
    B.S. in Automation
    Sep. 2016 - Jul. 2020
Honors & Awards
  • Weil Family Endowed Fellowship in Computer Science and Engineering
    2023
  • The Scholarship for Comprehensive Outstanding Performance of Graduate Students, Tsinghua University
    2021
  • Merit Student, Tsinghua University
    2020
  • National Scholarship of China
    2019
  • Tsinghua Innovation Award of Science and Technology
    2019
News
2025
Our Prov-GigaPath model has been downloaded for more than two million times since its release on Hugging Face . Congratulations!
Jul 09
Happy to announce that Pisces, a drug combination model that integrates eight modalities, has been published in Cell Genomics !
Jul 09
Thrilled to announce that our Prov-GigaPath model published in Nature was used in the first real-world, real-time clinical deployment of digital pathology foundation models.
Jul 09
Excited to see that our model has been available on Azure AI foundary !
Apr 01
2024
We are excited to bring LLaVA-Rad, a clinically accessible small multimodal radiology model, to the community! Please check our paper in Nature Communications.
Dec 02
We are excited to announce that the initial release of the Prov-GigaPath model and its code is now available. The GigaPath paper has been published in Nature .
May 22
We are excited to announce that BiomedCLIP has been published in NEJM AI .
Mar 22
2023
Happy to annouce that our work on applying generative AI to synthetic Biology has been published in Nature Communications Featured
Sep 05
Happy to annouce that my first Ph.D. work BioTranslator has been published in Nature Communications!
Feb 10
Selected Publications (view all )
A whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology from real-world data
A whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology from real-world data

Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Jaspreet Bagga, Sheng Zhang, Rajesh Rao, Tristan Naumann, Cliff Wong, Zelalem Gero, Javier González, Yu Gu, Yanbo Xu, Mu Wei, Wenhui Wang, Shuming Ma, Furu Wei, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Jaylen Rosemon, Tucker Bower, Soohee Lee, Roshanthi Weerasinghe, Bill J. Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon

Nature 2024 2,000,000 downloads

Prov-GigaPath is a large-scale digital pathology foundation model pretrained on 1.3 billion image tiles from 171,189 whole-slide images across 30,000+ patients and 31 tissue types in the Providence network. Built on a new GigaPath architecture that adapts LongNet for slide-level learning, it enables ultra-large-context modeling of gigapixel pathology slides. Prov-GigaPath achieves state-of-the-art results on 25 of 26 benchmark tasks and demonstrates strong potential for vision–language pathology modeling using real-world data.

A whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology from real-world data

Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Jaspreet Bagga, Sheng Zhang, Rajesh Rao, Tristan Naumann, Cliff Wong, Zelalem Gero, Javier González, Yu Gu, Yanbo Xu, Mu Wei, Wenhui Wang, Shuming Ma, Furu Wei, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Jaylen Rosemon, Tucker Bower, Soohee Lee, Roshanthi Weerasinghe, Bill J. Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon

Nature 2024 2,000,000 downloads

Prov-GigaPath is a large-scale digital pathology foundation model pretrained on 1.3 billion image tiles from 171,189 whole-slide images across 30,000+ patients and 31 tissue types in the Providence network. Built on a new GigaPath architecture that adapts LongNet for slide-level learning, it enables ultra-large-context modeling of gigapixel pathology slides. Prov-GigaPath achieves state-of-the-art results on 25 of 26 benchmark tasks and demonstrates strong potential for vision–language pathology modeling using real-world data.

Multilingual translation for zero-shot biomedical classification using BioTranslator
Multilingual translation for zero-shot biomedical classification using BioTranslator

Hanwen Xu, Addie Woicik, Hoifung Poon, Russ Altman, Sheng Wang

Nature Communications 2023

BioTranslator introduces a multilingual translation framework that maps free-text biological concepts to non-text data, enabling scientists to interact with biological data without relying on predefined vocabularies. It allows the discovery of novel entities such as cell types and generalizes to tasks like protein function prediction and drug target identification.

Multilingual translation for zero-shot biomedical classification using BioTranslator

Hanwen Xu, Addie Woicik, Hoifung Poon, Russ Altman, Sheng Wang

Nature Communications 2023

BioTranslator introduces a multilingual translation framework that maps free-text biological concepts to non-text data, enabling scientists to interact with biological data without relying on predefined vocabularies. It allows the discovery of novel entities such as cell types and generalizes to tasks like protein function prediction and drug target identification.

All publications