Clinical Research Study Team Member
Multimodal AI for TAVR risk prediction (clinical imaging + EHR).
About Me
I am a Ph.D. researcher in Computer Science at the University of North Dakota, specializing in Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Multimodal Learning. My work focuses on developing state-of-the-art AI solutions for biomedical text and relation mining, with applications in health informatics and bioinformatics.
I design and evaluate BioNLP pipelines using models such as BERT, GPT, Llama, and Gemini, aiming to accelerate discovery in biomedicine through automated literature mining and information extraction. I served as the team lead and first author of a system recognized as a runner-up in the BioASQ BioNNE challenge, presented at CLEF 2024. I have also presented at the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO) and university research symposia.
My first-author publications appear in venues such as Bioinformatics Advances, and I have contributed as a co-author to collaborative studies in BMC Public Health.
Updated October 2025
News
- Nov 2025 — Paper accepted to AMIA Annual Symposium 2025: “Leveraging LLMs for cancer vaccine adjuvant name extraction.”
- Jun 2025 — Joined Sanford Research as Clinical Research Study Team Member (TAVR risk prediction with multimodal AI).
- May 2025 — GLBIO 2025 talk: “Identifying Cancer Vaccine Adjuvants using LLMs.”
- Oct 2024 — Abstract selected at ISV Annual Congress 2024 on LLMs in vaccine discovery.
- Sep 2024 — First-author paper in Bioinformatics Advances on PPI identification using LLMs.
Publications
Visit Google Scholar for a full list.
- H. Rehana, J. Zheng, F.-Y. Yeh, B. Bansal, N.B. Çam, C. Jemiyo, B. McGregor, A. Özgür, Y. He, J. Hur (2025). Leveraging large language models for cancer vaccine adjuvant name extraction from biomedical literature. AMIA Annual Symposium 2025 (Accepted). Atlanta, GA, Nov 15–19, 2025. Code Preprint
- H. Rehana, N.B. Çam, M. Basmaci, J. Zheng, C. Jemiyo, Y. He, A. Özgür, J. Hur (2024). Evaluating GPT and BERT models for protein–protein interaction identification in biomedical text. Bioinformatics Advances, 4(1), vbae133. DOI Code
- H. Rehana, B. Bansal, N.B. Çam, J. Zheng, Y. He, A. Özgür, J. Hur (2024). Nested named entity recognition using a multilayer BERT-based model. CLEF Working Notes. PDF Code
- C. Jemiyo, B.A. McGregor, H. Rehana, J. Hur (2025). Adverse childhood experiences and chronic health outcomes … BMC Public Health, 25(1), 1650. DOI
- H. Rehana et al. (2021). A bioinformatics approach for identification of the core ontologies and signature genes of pulmonary disease … Gene Reports. DOI
- S. Asaduzzaman et al. (2021). Machine learning to reveal an astute risk predictive framework for Gynecologic Cancer … BMC Bioinformatics. DOI
- Md. R. Ahmed, H. Rehana, S. Asaduzzaman (2021). Protein interaction network and drug design of stomach cancer … Journal of Proteins and Proteomics. DOI
- H. Rehana, S. Asaduzzaman, R. Chakma (2021). 3D–2D BCNN … for Hyperspectral Imaging. ICIEV & icIVPR. DOI
- H. Rehana (2017). Bangla handwritten digit classification and recognition using SVM … EICT. DOI
Preprints
- J. Zheng, A.Y. Lin, A. Huffman, …, H. Rehana, …, Y. He, et al. (2025). VO: The Vaccine Ontology. bioRxiv. DOI
- N.B. Çam, H. Rehana, J. Zheng, … (2025). Ontology-based protein–protein interaction explanation using LLMs. bioRxiv. DOI
- H. Rehana, M. Ibrahim, H. Ali (2023). Plant disease detection using region-based CNN. arXiv. arXiv
Work
Experience
Graduate Research Assistant
Biomedical NLP & LLMs for relation extraction and vaccine informatics (Hur Lab).
Lecturer (on study leave)
Daffodil International University, Bangladesh
Convener
Awards
- Challenge Award — BioASQ12 Task BioNNE 2024, 2nd place (Bilingual, English & Russian Nested NER)
- Travel Award — Data Science Symposium, South Dakota State University (2024)
- Best Poster — Cyber Awareness and Research Symposium (UND, 2023)
- ICT Masters Fellowship — Government of Bangladesh
- Google Study Jam, Hackathons, Android Study Jam
Talks & Posters
- Identifying cancer vaccine adjuvants in biomedical literature using LLMs — GLBIO, 2025 (Talk)
- Cancer vaccine adjuvant name recognition from clinical trial data using LLMs — VDOS Workshop @ ICBO, 2024 (Talk, Virtual)
- ChatGPT to identify drug–drug interactions from biomedical texts — ICBO VDOS, 2023 (Talk, Virtual)
- Vaccine adjuvant LLMs — Frank Low Research Day, UND, 2025 (Poster)
- Multilayer BERT for Nested NER — GRAD, UND, 2025 (Poster)
- Adjuvant names from clinical trial data — ND EPSCoR, 2024 (Poster)
- Adjuvant names from clinical trial data — ISV Annual Congress, 2024 (Poster; presented by J. Hur)
- DDIs with LLMs — Frank Low Research Day, UND, 2024 (Poster)
- NPBS, 2024 (Poster)
- PPI extraction with LLMs — GRAD, UND, 2024 (Poster)
- SDSU Data Science Symposium, 2024 (Poster)
- Evaluation of GPT-3 on PPI — GRAD, UND, 2023 (Poster)
- PPI identification using GPT — CARS, UND, 2023 (Poster; 1st place)
Service & Memberships
- Reviewer: Scientific Reports (Springer Nature), 2 manuscripts.
- Memberships: IEEE (Student), ACM (Student), ISCB (Student), UND Robotics Club, Engineers Without Borders, ACM Student Chapter.