Assistant Professor Lingfei Wu is co-PI for a new NIH R01-funded project on “The Anatomy of Scientific Biomedical Open-Source Software—From Code to Communities.”
This newly-awarded R01 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) began on September 5, 2025, and runs through July 31, 2027. The project is co-led by Bogdan Vasilescu (Contact PI, Carnegie Mellon University) and Lingfei Wu (Multiple PI, University of Pittsburgh). The award is for $241,506.
This research fills a critical gap in understanding the open-source software (OSS) infrastructure that underpins modern biomedical science. Although OSS is essential—from genomic pipelines to imaging and clinical modeling—its origins, sustainability, and scientific impact remain poorly understood. The project systematically analyzes the emergence and evolution of biomedical OSS, the maintenance and sustainability of scientific software communities, and how software health shapes scientific productivity, reproducibility, and innovation. As part of this broader agenda on the scientific impact of research infrastructure, the award also supports a new line of inquiry into how emerging AI tools in science interact with biomedical OSS ecosystems and influence scientific innovation. This integrated approach will allow researchers to assess not only how software enables today’s research, but also how AI will reshape the next generation of discovery. More details about the project are available from the NIH RePORTER site.
Lingfei Wu is a computational social scientist interested in understanding the geometry of thinking and applying it to design the future of science, education, and work in the knowledge economy. He joined the faculty of the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems in 2019 and his work has been prominently featured in prestigous publications such as Nature, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Nature Communications. In 2023, Professor Wu was awarded the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award for his work on "How Does Core Scientific Knowledge Advance? Understanding Team Innovation at the Foundations of Sciences.”