Zheng Yang

Worldwide Head of AI/ML Strategy and Solutions for Healthcare and Life Sciences AWS

Zheng is the strategic leader of AI/ML and generative AI (genAI) of Healthcare Life Sciences (HCLS). Zheng has been with AWS for 2.5 years, and brings 20 years of HCLS experience. He has developed the HCLS genAI strategies, and is leading “big bets” initiatives at AWS. Before AWS, Zheng was a senior global executive at Boehringer Ingelheim, responsible for the strategy and execution of global data and tech innovation for human pharma business, from discovery, clinical, medical affairs, to commercial excellence. He was the mastermind of the Boehringer holistic data ecosystem “DataLand” to accelerate the launch of New Medicines. He also led BI OPEN Data Science challenge and pushed data-driven culture change to all function areas at every country. Before Boehringer, Zheng was a productive drug hunter, high performance computing (HPC) thought leader, and prolific mentor at GlaxoSmithKline. He co-discovered an antibiotic Gepotidacin for the US Dept. of Defense, featured on CNN Health. He was responsible for 90% of GSK HPC, and co-founded the Cross Pharma HPC Forum in 2007. Zheng and the Cross Pharma HPC Forum first introduced AWS Cloud to global pharma scientific computing community in 2012. He trained many postdoctoral researchers, and one of them co-discovered Paxlovid against COVID. On the personal side, Zheng grew up in Shanghai as a city boy, and got the best education there. In 1997 Zheng went to Univ. of Calif., Santa Cruz to pursue the PhD with Prof. W. Todd Wipke, the co-founder of Computer Chemistry. Zheng has lived in US since.