Hoifung Poon
Introduced in 2025 as general manager of Microsoft Health Futures; co-author of LLaVA-Med and Medprompt
Hoifung Poon was introduced at a February 2025 Microsoft Research Forum keynote as general manager of Microsoft Health Futures, in charge of biomedical AI research and incubation for precision health, with a focus on multimodal generative AI and population-scale real-world evidence. In that keynote, Poon described GigaPath, a digital pathology foundation model created with Providence Health System and the University of Washington and published in Nature. Poon is a co-author of LLaVA-Med, a vision-language assistant for biomedical images, and of the Medprompt study of prompting generalist foundation models on medical benchmarks.123
Work
LLaVA-Med (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author of the 2023 paper "LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day", which fine-tunes a general-domain vision-language model on instruction data generated from PubMed Central figure captions.2
Medprompt (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author of "Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine" (2023), which introduces Medprompt, a composition of prompting strategies evaluated on medical benchmark datasets.3
GigaPath (external site: microsoft.com)Published research
Presented GigaPath in a Microsoft Research Forum keynote as a digital pathology foundation model created by Poon's team with Providence Health System and the University of Washington, adapting dilated attention to whole-slide images, and published in Nature.1
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- General Manager, Microsoft Health Futures (as introduced in February 2025), Microsoft Health Futures (Microsoft Research)1
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