Call to PyHealth Research Initiative (Spring 2026)#

Published: December 3, 2025 | Last Revised: December 5, 2025

Hey everyone,

First off, I want to thank everyone who worked so hard to publish papers at ML4H this cycle—our first attempt at the PyHealth Research Initiative! It’s been really exciting to connect with everyone and talk to different people at ML4H, especially as the topics we published on—rare diseases, social determinants of health, and prostate cancer genomics—are all at the forefront of healthcare and AI. Check out the highlights from this year’s cohort!

We’re excited to continue making PyHealth more accessible and relevant to real-world healthcare AI problems. To that end, we’re issuing an open call to join the PyHealth Research Initiative.

What is the PyHealth Research Initiative?#

We’re an open-source community of researchers with the goal of building:

  1. Easily accessible and reproducible research

  2. Solutions to real-world healthcare problems

  3. Connections with healthcare professionals

We connect those who want to work on healthcare problems with industry and academic collaborators to tackle important clinical challenges. To see our work published at reputable conferences, please visit: PyHealth Research Initiative.

Why Join?#

Simply put, we offer:

  1. Direct mentorship from experts across a wide variety of healthcare disciplines

  2. Potential industry and academic collaborations

  3. Interesting and challenging healthcare problems

At the end of the program, you’ll ideally have gained:

  1. A peer-reviewed paper published at a respectable venue, establishing you as a credible researcher in the field

  2. Direct, hands-on experience working on real healthcare AI problems

  3. Code merged into PyHealth that can be leveraged for other career goals

Timeline & Open Projects#

We’re always looking for contributors to PyHealth and people to work on interesting healthcare problems—that doesn’t change, and you can start early! However, our target venue for this cycle is MLHC 2026 (Machine Learning for Healthcare), with the following key dates:

Time Commitment: We expect participants to dedicate 10–20 hours per week to this program.

  • Official Research Initiative start date: January 20, 2026 — We’ll hold a kickoff meeting to go over program details. Meeting information will be announced via Discord closer to the date.

  • Pre-submission intent deadline: April 10, 2026

  • Full submission deadline: April 11, 2026

  • Conference dates: August 15–16, 2026

We plan to run this research program over the spring, working toward the MLHC submission deadline. All official announcements and communication will be done through our Discord server, so make sure to join!

Open Projects: Browse our list of (not yet finalized) available research projects and find one that matches your interests: Open Projects List

Criteria for Acceptance#

We’re open to people from all kinds of backgrounds. We don’t care if you’re a student or a full-time engineer. We only ask that you have the ability to write decent-quality code and are self-driven to work hard on healthcare problems. We are looking at PyHealth pull requests specifically to evaluate applications.

How Do I Apply?#

There are three steps to apply:

  1. Join the PyHealth Discord: https://discord.gg/mpb835EHaX

  2. Submit an application (especially for those interested in industry collaborations): Application Form

  3. Submit a high-quality pull request to PyHealth

Get Involved#

We’re always looking for feedback, feature requests, and contributions. Here’s how to stay connected:

Thanks for being part of the community!