Hoifung Poon is a globally recognized leader in biomedical AI, working at the intersection of frontier AI research and real-world applications in biology and medicine. He joins Recursion as its first Chief AI Officer, responsible for the company's end-to-end AI strategy and execution across drug discovery and clinical development. Prior to Recursion, he spent 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as General Manager at Microsoft Research, where he helped create Microsoft Health Futures, built a founding team on biomedical AI, and launched the real-world evidence mission for precision health. His research centers on developing a unified biomedical world model by bridging virtual patient and virtual cell, thus turning real-world data into a discovery engine through a generalized lab-in-the-loop flywheel. His team and collaborators are among the first to explore large language models (LLMs) and multimodal generative AI in biomedical applications, producing popular open-source foundation models such as PubMedBERT, BioGPT, BiomedCLIP, LLaVA-Med, BiomedParse, with tens of millions of downloads. His latest publications in Nature and Cell feature groundbreaking digital pathology and spatial proteomics foundation models such as GigaPath and GigaTIME. He has led successful research partnerships with large health providers and life science companies, creating AI systems in daily use for applications such as molecular tumor board and clinical trial matching. His prior work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards from premier AI venues such as NAACL, EMNLP, and UAI, and he was named the "Technology Champion" by the Puget Sound Business Journal in the 2024 Health Care Leadership Awards. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, specializing in machine learning and NLP. He is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Medical School.