Dr. Pingkun Yan is the P.K. Lashmet Chair Professor and Department Head of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Before joining RPI, he was a Senior Scientist of Philips Research working at the clinical site at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His research focuses on translational medical imaging informatics and image-guided intervention using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques through close collaboration with clinicians.

Dr. Yan has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles in well-recognized journals including Nature Communications, PNAS, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE T-MI, IEEE T-CSVT, IEEE T-BME, IEEE T-ITB, Medical Physics, and top international conferences including MICCAI, ICCV, CVPR, and ISBI. His publications have been cited more than 13,000 times. His research work has also resulted in 20+ patent filings and issued patents.

Dr. Yan is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and NIBIB Trailblazer award. He received the MICCAI Best Paper Award in 2005 for his work on segmenting blood vessels from magnetic resonance angiography by modeling the capillary action. In 2008, he was recognized as one of the four finalists of the Innovation in Industry Award by the New York Academy of Sciences, which stood out from 120 nominees across the state of New York, for his contribution to prostate cancer diagnosis.

Dr. Yan also contributes to the international research community as a board member of the MICCAI Society. He is the Chair of the IEEE EMBS Technical Committee on Biomedical Imaging and Image Processing, and was named an IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer for 2025–26. He serves as an associate editor for multiple international journals, including IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging and Neurocomputing by Elsevier. Dr. Yan is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).