Congratulations to Dr. Hongtao Hao!

Congratulations to Dr. Hongtao Hao, who completed his PhD in May 2026.

Hongtao’s work built the lab’s line of research on disease progression modeling: stage-aware event-based models, inference of disease subtypes, joint modeling of mixed pathologies, and — most recently — TEMPO, which learns to do the inference with a transformer trained on the probabilistic model’s own simulations. That is a lot of ground to cover in one dissertation, and the work has continued past it.

We are delighted for him, and glad the collaboration continues. You can find him at hongtaoh.com.