Nayoon Gim, E-21, Wins Two Awards For Innovative and Replicable Research

Nayoon Gim, MSTP E-21, has been selected as a 2026-2027 Magnuson Scholar as well as a “Track 2” award winner from the NIH. Both awards underline Nayoon’s innovative and replicable research in diabetes and it’s ophthalmic outcomes. Nayoon played a central role in the AI-READI dataset (Artificial Intelligence Ready and Exploratory Atlas for Diabetes Insights) project, helping release over 180,000 standardized retinal scans now used by more than 900 research groups worldwide. The full article detailing Nayoon’s current research leading to her Magnuson Scholar award is linked here.

In addition, she also helped to create a privacy preserving LLM framework that turns “natural language” questions into statistical analyses, enabling rapid evaluation of 100+ hypotheses about diabetic complications without exposing sensitive date from patients. By enabling scalable, data driven validation across datasets, this approach reproduced major findings from established studies while accelerating the pace of analysis. Nayoon’s data set will be compiled and published as a publicly available reference on the NIH website this upcoming summer. Read more about the NIH Replication Prize here.

Nayoon is motivated by personal experiences with chronic illness in older adults, she aims to integrate patient care, computational research, and leadership to improve how clinical data becomes actionable evidence.