A Monash University researcher has been awarded a prestigious Viertel Fellowship, valued at AU$1.375 million over five years, to advance artificial intelligence (AI)-driven healthcare.
Associate Professor Zongyuan Ge, from the Faculty of Information Technology, has been named this year’s Bellberry-Viertel Fellow and is the first ever AI scientist to receive this medical research Fellowship.
Assoc Prof Ge is working to develop Australia’s first Unified Phenotype Foundation Model, an AI system designed to integrate diverse patient data – such as images, scans, clinical notes, and long-term medical histories – to enable earlier diagnosis, improved prognoses, and personalised healthcare.
Describing the recognition as an “incredible honour”, Assoc Prof Ge said the Fellowship would allow the building of “a new unified foundation for medical AI – one that learns from the full picture of a person’s health and can drive earlier, more accurate, and more equitable care for the diverse healthcare needs of the Australian population”.
The Viertel Foundation was established with an initial bequest of $60 million. The Foundation is now worth around $260 million and distributes approximately $9 million annually.
