James Zou

James Zou is an associate professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. A leader in artificial intelligence for biomedicine, he joined the Stanford faculty in 2016 following his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 2014. Earlier in his career, Zou was a Simons Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, a Gates-Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a researcher at Microsoft Research New England. He currently directs the Stanford AI for Science Lab and serves as faculty director of the Stanford Data Science Institute. His research specializes in making AI systems more reliable, robust, and interpretable, particularly for applications in human health and disease, including statistical foundations of machine learning, generative models, and AI-driven scientific discovery.

Zou's contributions have been recognized with prestigious awards such as the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2020), two Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator awards (2017 and 2023), the RECOMB Best Paper Award (2019), and the ICML Outstanding Paper Award (2025) for CollabLLM. He has received faculty research awards from Google, Amazon, Adobe, Apple, and Genentech. Notable publications include "Video-based AI for beat-to-beat assessment of cardiac function" in Nature (2020), "Data Shapley: Equitable valuation of data for machine learning" at ICML (2019), "Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? Debiasing word embeddings" at NeurIPS (2016), "Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes" in PNAS (2018), and recent advances like "The Virtual Lab" in Nature (2025) and "Agents4Science" in Nature Biotechnology (2025). His innovations, such as EchoNet AI which received FDA clearance, are transforming clinical practice, while his work influences policy on fair and accountable AI in healthcare. Zou teaches courses like Foundation Models for Healthcare and Deep Learning in Genomics and Biomedicine, mentoring numerous PhD students and postdocs.