Richard Wen

Richard Wen is a Senior Research Consultant at CGHR, advising across artificial intelligence (AI), data science, geographic information systems (GIS/GIScience), and systems engineering. His work focuses on building and evaluating socioeconomic systems to improve lives at scale, especially for underserved populations.

He founded and directed CGHR’s Open Mortality platform, capturing over 600,000 deaths outside hospital settings to help the living, study the dead. The platform is used today by renowned institutions and governments internationally, including Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Stanford, MIT, the University of Toronto, and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health. He also evaluates large language models for verbal autopsy and cause-of-death assignment, with studies published in BMC Medicine and Malaria Journal.

Richard holds a PhD in Civil Engineering and Master’s in Spatial Analysis from Toronto Metropolitan University, and a Bachelor’s in Geomatics with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He is an affiliated researcher at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM) and the Data Sciences Institute (DSI) at the University of Toronto, and an associate member at the Yeates School of Graduate Studies (YSGS) in Toronto Metropolitan University. He also serves as a peer reviewer for journals across IEEE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage, and MDPI.