Email: qwang16 [at] wm [dot] edu

Hello!

I am Qingyun Wang, an Assistant Professor of the Data Science Department at College of William and Mary, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science Department.

I received my Ph.D. degree from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2025. Previously, I graduated summa cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a dual B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in 2019. From 2017 to 2025, I was a member of the BLENDER Lab and was fortunate to have Prof. Heng Ji as my advisor. I am also grateful for the mentorship from Prof. Jiawei Han, Prof. Lifu Huang, and Prof. Tom Hope.

I am among the first researchers to develop a virtual scientific research assistant (i.e., PaperRobot [ACL 2019]) for literature-based discovery by extracting and synthesizing insights from papers. My long-term vision is to develop AI for Scientists (AI4Scientist) tools to accelerate discovery and make scientific research more accessible.

Research Interests

1. Multimodal Scientific Understanding: Develop foundation models that integrate text, equations, tables, and figures, ground reasoning in scientific evidence; Design model can dynamically extract and integrate new multimodal knowledge elements without additional training; Use data consistency across modaility to improve multimodal alignment: CURV (COLM ’26), CoCoEvolve (arXiv ’26)
2. Scientific Knowledge Acquisition: Extract, organize, and validate scientific knowledge with limited annotation: COVID-KG (NAACL ’21, Best Demo 🏆), Domain-Shift NER (NAACL ’24), Progressive Ontology Prompting (IJCAI ’25)
3. Scientific Reasoning and Discovery: Combine literature, structured knowledge, and scientific constraints to generate hypotheses, plan procedures, and evaluate scientific claims with evidence: CiteGuard (ACL ’26), Physics Reasoning (EMNLP ’26), SciMON (ACL ’24), Multimedia Task Planning (ACL ’23 Findings).
4. Interactive Scientific Research Agents: Build agents that use tools and learn from human and experimental feedback to support the research lifecycle, with a long-term goal of physical laboratory interaction: AnaBench (EMNLP ’26), FloWright(arXiv ‘26), PaperRobot (ACL ’19), ReviewRobot (INLG ’20), MLR-Copilot (arXiv ’24)

Prospective students

I am constantly looking for highly motivated PhD students (as fully-funded RAs/TAs) and interns to join our AI4Scientist lab! If you are interested in working with me, please fill [this form], and [apply for admission] to William & Mary. After completing the form, you are also welcome to reach out via email (qwang16 [at] wm [dot] edu). I will read all submitted forms and emails but I do apologize for not being able to respond to each of them. Prospective Students English, Prospective Students Chinese

I’m happy to collaborate and answer questions about my research.

Recent News

• Oct 27, 2026: Excited to deliver an invited tutorial for the Canadian Consortium on Agentic AI for Health Science Discovery (AID4HS) , in Jan 2027!

• Sept 8, 2026: One paper accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Aug 20, 2026: Two papers accepted to EMNLP 2026! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Aug 16, 2026. We received an NSF NAIRR Pilot computation award to support the development of a multimodal, hierarchical cyberattack simulation suite for water infrastructure.

• Aug 6, 2026: We were awarded 20,000 Frontier node-hours through an Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) Director Discretionary Project.

• Jul 8, 2026: One paper accepted to COLM 2026! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Jul 3, 2026: We received OpenAI research credits for our research! Thanks to OpenAI’s Researcher Access Program.

• Apr 30, 2026: One paper accepted to ICML 2026! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Apr 6, 2026: One paper accepted to ACL 2026! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Feb 5, 2026: We received William & Mary Applied Research & Innovation Initiative Full Grant. Thanks to William & Mary Applied Research & Innovation Initiative for their support!

• Nov 7, 2025: We received Google Cloud credits for our research! Thanks to Google Cloud Research Credits Program.

• Aug 20, 2025: Three paper accepted to EMNLP 2025! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Jul 4, 2025: We will organize the Scaling Environments for Agents (SEA) at NeurIPS 2025, in San Diego, in Dec 2025!

• Jun 6, 2025: We will present a tutorial on Towards a Human-AI Collaborative Medical Research Lifecycle: A Pilot Study at AMIA 2025 in Atlanta, GA, in Nov 2025!

• May 15, 2025: One paper accepted to ACL 2025! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.

• Apr 11, 2025: We will organize the VISTA: Visionary Innovation in Standards and Technology of GenAI at ICDM 2025 in Washington DC, in Nov 2025!

• Jan 12, 2025: One paper accepted to NAACL 2025! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.