Bridge2AI November 2023
* KEYNOTE SPEAKERS * MODERATORS * SESSION LEADS *
* KEYNOTE SPEAKERS * MODERATORS * SESSION LEADS *
Keynote Speaker
Keith Norris, MD, PhD - AIM-AHEAD
Professor of Medicine, UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research
Dr. Keith C. Norris is an internationally recognized clinician scientist and health policy leader who has been instrumental in shaping national health policy and clinical practice guidelines for chronic kidney disease (CKD). A board certified nephrologist, in 1995, he was invited to join the inaugural National Kidney Foundation Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative, and was a founding member of the subsequent Medicare End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) continuous Performance Measures workgroup. He presently serves as a member of the Forum of ESRD Networks, Medical Advisory Board. He also co-directs the Center for Kidney Disease Research, Education and Hope (CURE-CKD), a Providence St. Joseph Health/UCLA partnership using electronic health record data to examine outcomes and quality of care for over 2.7 million patients with CKD and/or at risk for CKD (hypertension, diabetes, pre- diabetes).
He has made major contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion while addressing disparities in contemporary society. For nearly 30 years he has worked to enhance community-academic partnerships and promote community partnered research. He was the Principal Investigator for the multi-site NIH-NIDDK funded African American Study of Kidney Disease and Hypertension (AASK) and the AASK Cohort Study, the largest comparative drug intervention trial focusing on renal outcomes conducted in African Americans. Dr. Norris was the founding Principal Investigator for the first national translational research network dedicated to reducing health disparities, the NIH-Research Centers in Minority Institutions Translational Research Network. He has extensive experience in patient recruitment and retention, and community-partnered research within the South Los Angeles community. He directs several NIH research and training grants including the NIH Diversity Program Consortium Coordination and Evaluation Center at UCLA, the centerpiece of the largest NIH initiative to enhance diversity in the biomedical workforce. Read more.
NIH
Haluk Resat, PhD - NIH
Dr. Haluk Resat joined the Office of Strategic Coordination in 2020, where he helps to integrate data from multiple Common Fund programs within the Common Fund Data Ecosystem. Previously, Dr. Resat was a program director in the Division of Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences (BBCB) at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). In this role, he managed research and training grants in bioinformatics, computational biology, data science, mathematical biology, systems biology, and biotechnology areas. Before joining NIGMS/NIH, Dr. Resat was an associate professor in the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Washington State University. He has also worked as a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and was an associate professor at Koç University in Turkey. Dr. Resat earned a B.S. in physics and electrical engineering from Bogaziçi University in Turkey and a Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University. He was a postdoctoral fellow both at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York and the University of California, San Diego. Read more.
Shurjo K. Sen, PhD - NIH
Program Director, Dr. Sen joined the National Human Genome Research Institute's Extramural Research Program as a program director in 2019. He manages a portfolio of grants focused upon genomic data sciences, and is particularly interested in transitioning genomics from a centralized data repository model to cloud-based collaborative science. Apart from genomic data science, Dr. Sen’s grant portfolio also includes genomic technology development, including computational technologies. Dr. Sen also has an interest in training initiatives at NHGRI that aim to create an expanded and diverse bioinformatics workforce for managing the massive data volumes being produced in genomics. Read more.
Grace C.Y. Peng, PhD - NIH
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
Grace C.Y. Peng, Ph.D. is the Director of Mathematical Modeling, Simulation and Analysis at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). In this capacity she has programmatic oversight of extramural activities in these areas. Read more.
Keyvan Farahani, PhD – NIH
Biomedical Imaging Informatics Specialist
I support NCI’s cancer data science with emphasis on imaging informatics. My expertise lies in knowledge of biomedical imaging, minimally invasive cancer therapies, the development of data repositories, and software tools for machine learning/artificial intelligence applications in imaging and cancer research. I am also on a part-time detail with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), where I support the development of imaging and artificial intelligence platforms for key NHLBI data science initiatives, including the BioData Catalyst. I am an active member of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). Read more.
Kristina Faulk, PhD – NIH
Senior Advisor for Program Administration and Policy
Ms. Kristina Faulk joined the NIH in 2001 as a research assistant in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Her research focused on pathogenesis and immunogenicity of Hepatitis C and E viruses, and GB virus B. Prior to joining NIH, Ms. Faulk was a research assistant in DuPont’s Agricultural Biotechnology division working on insect and disease resistance of rice plants, and a contractor in DuPont Merck’s Pharmacokinetics unit, which focused on HIV therapeutics. Ms. Faulk received her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Delaware and her certificate in technology transfer from the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences. She is currently pursuing dual master’s in biotechnology management and business administration through the University of Maryland University College. Ms. Faulk joined the Office of Strategic Coordination as a Health Specialist in 2013. Read more.
Dave Kaufman, PhD – NIH
Program Director, Division of Genomics and Society
Dave Kaufman is a program director who joined the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in May of 2014, after working as an NHGRI ELSI grantee for several years. He oversees a portfolio of research and career development grants related to the ethical, legal and social implications of genomic research. Dr. Kaufman serves as the primary ELSI advisor to the Clinical Sequencing Evidence-Generating Research (CSER) consortium and participates in a variety of ELSI-related trans-NHGRI and trans-NIH initiatives and programs, including a Citizen Science Working Group. Read more.
Chris Kinsinger, PhD – NIH
Assistant Director for Catalytic Data Resources Office of Strategic Coordination
Dr. Kinsinger joined the Office of Strategic Coordination in 2020, where he helps integrate data from multiple Common Fund programs with the Common Fund Data Ecosystem. Previously, Dr. Kinsinger worked as a Program Director of the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) in the National Cancer Institute, where he led operations for data management and biospecimen processing for the proteogenomic characterization program. In this role, he oversaw development of the CPTAC Data Coordinating Center and the Proteomic Data Commons, a node of the Cancer Research Data Commons. He also managed the CPTAC biospecimen collection pipeline, consisting of over 30 tissue source sites and served as a scientific mentor for the American Association of Cancer Research’s Scientist Survivor Program for patient advocates. Chris received his Ph.D. in computational chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 2004, studying oxidation mechanisms of bioinorganic complexes. He then completed a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where he investigated potential energy surfaces of gas-phase dissociation of peptides. Read more.
Madji Lodoumgoto, BS – NIH
Scientific Program Analyst, Office of Genomic Data Science
Madji joined NHGRI as the Scientific Program Analyst supporting the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program. She graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with her B.S. in Translational Life Science Technology on the Bioinformatics Track. During her time at UMBC, she interned at a molecular biology lab where she studied the effects of COVID-19 by inducing HTB-182 cells and investigating the expression of the protein CCL19. She has an interest in computational genomics and plans on pursuing higher education in Bioinformatics. Read more.
Lanay M. Mudd, PhD - NIH
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
Lanay joined the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) as a program director in July 2015. Her grant portfolio centers on clinical studies of movement meditation, including yoga, tai chi, and qi gong. Dr. Mudd’s interests include physical activity measurement as well as the use of mind and body interventions for perinatal health conditions and for promoting healthy behaviors. She is also NCCIH’s representative to the National Institutes of Health Common Fund initiative on Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity in Humans. Read more.
George Papanicalaou, PhD - NIH
Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Program Leader
Dr. Papanicolaou joined the Office of Strategic Coordination in 2021, where he helps integrate data from multiple Common Fund programs with the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE). Previously, Dr. Papanicolaou worked as a Research Geneticist in the Epidemiology Branch in the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences in the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (NHLBI). While a Program Director at NHLBI, he led efforts in genomics and omics in diverse programs such as Candidate Gene Resource (CARe), SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource), Omics in Latinos (OLa), Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed), and TOPMed’s Centralized Omics Resource (CORE). He was also the Program Officer for the Framingham Heart Study. George also drafted standards and pipelines adopted by TOPMed for its omics resources. In addition, he served on the Steering Committee of Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE). George received his Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan, studying and mapping tumor suppressor effects of regions of chromosome 6 on melanoma in Dr. Jeffrey Trent’s Laboratory of Cancer Genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). He then completed a postdoc and fellowship in statistical genetics in Dr. Alec F. Wilson’s group at the Inherited Disease Research Branch at NHGRI. He also lectured and served as a discussant at Johns Hopkins University. Read more.
Xujing Wang, PhD - NIH
Program Director: Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology, & Metabolic Diseases
As the program director for data science and computational biomodelling, I manage a research portfolio of projects that develop methods and tools that enable the utilization of data science in, that utilize high-throughput (Big) data in, and that develop computational, or joint computational and laboratory approaches to model biological processes relevant to, diabetes and metabolic disease research, or any other area of disease or biology of relevance to the DEM mission. I am also the program director for HIRN-CBDS, HIRN-HPAP, dkNET, and co-program director for TEDDY. Read more.
Qilu Yu, PhD - NIH
Statistician, Office of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs
Qilu Yu, Ph.D., is a statistician in the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) Office of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs. She serves as a senior collaborator and expert statistical advisor in areas relating to the development and application of statistical techniques to NCCIH-funded clinical trials. She also provides guidance and consultation on design, implementation, and analysis of extramural and intramural studies. Read more.
Consortium
Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, MBA, PhD - Administrative Core
Yale University School of Medicine, Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Data Science; Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics; Chair, Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
As Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics, Ohno-Machado oversees the infrastructure related to biomedical informatics research across the academic health system. Biomedical Informatics and Data Science serves as the hub for biomedical collaboration at Yale. It brings informatics to the clinic and the bedside; innovates new approaches to the analysis of big data across the biomedical research spectrum from basic genetic, proteomic, cellular, and systems biology to the understanding of the social determinants of health; and works in concert with colleagues in data science. Read more.
Jake Y. Chen, PhD - CM4AI DGP
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Informatics Institute, Birmingham, AL
Dr. Jake Y. Chen is the Chief Bioinformatics Officer at UAB Informatics Institute and a Professor of Genetics, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering. Previously, he was the founding director of Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine. He has over 25 years of R&D experience in biological data mining and systems biology, with over 180 peer-reviewed publications. He is currently President-elect of the Midsouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He also serves on the editorial boards of BMC Bioinformatics, Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. In 2019, he was recognized by Deep Knowledge Analytics as one of the “Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Healthcare”. Read more.
Alex A. T. Bui, PhD - Tools Optimization & Skills and Workforce Development Cores
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Radiological Sciences
Dr. Bui received his PhD in Computer Science in 2000, upon which he joined the UCLA faculty. He is now the Director of the Medical & Imaging Informatics (MII) group. His research includes informatics and data science for biomedical research and healthcare in areas related to distributed information architectures and mHealth; methodological development, application, and evaluation of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, including machine/reinforcement learning; and data visualization. His work bridges contemporary computational approaches with the opportunities arising from the breadth of biomedical observations and the electronic health record (EHR), tackling the associated translational challenges. Read more.
Paul C. Boutros, PhD, MBA - Tools Optimization & Skills and Workforce Development Cores
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Human Genetics
Paul Boutros, PhD, MBA, is a renowned data scientist and professor in the departments of human genetics and urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He currently serves as director of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Cancer Data Science program and associate director of cancer informatics at the UCLA Institute for Precision Health, and is a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. Read more.
Peipei Ping, PhD – Skills and Workforce Development & Tools Optimization Cores
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Physiology, Medicine/Cardiology
Peipei Ping, Ph.D., is a Professor of Physiology, Medicine/Cardiology, and Bioinformatics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Zhejiang University, China in 1985. Mentored by Dr. Paul C. Johnson, Dr. Ping received her Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology at University of Arizona in 1990. Subsequently, she completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. James E. Faber’s Vascular Biology laboratory at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a second postdoctoral training with Dr. H. Kirk Hammond at UCSD in Molecular Cardiology and translational research. Under the mentorship of Dr. H. Kirk Hammond, she made remarkable contributions in elucidating the expression and signaling of diverse G protein receptor kinases and beta-adrenergic receptors in the normal and injured heart, which resulted publications in high-impact journals as J Clin Invest (1995) and Nature Medicine (1996). In 1996, Dr. Ping accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Department of physiology/Division of Cardiology at University of Louisville where she worked closely with Dr. Roberto Bolli and pioneered a functional proteomics approach to identify the protein signaling modalities in ischemic/reperfusion injuries and cardioprotection. In 1998, her research group was the first to identify the subproteomes containing PKCε that are responsible for signaling mediation of cardioprotection. Dr. Ping was promoted as Associate Professor in 2000. Read more.
Yael Bensoussan, MD, MSc FRCSC - Voice DGP
College of Medicine Otolaryngology University of South Florida, Department of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, Tampa, FL
Dr. Bensoussan is currently the director of the USF Health Voice Center. She is passionate about voice and technology and completed her Masters degree in System Leadership and Innovations at the University of Toronto with a focus in AI and laryngology. She strongly believes that collaborations and partnerships are indispensable for successful implementation of innovation. Read more.
Anne E. Thessen, PhD - Teaming Core
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Anne is a semantic engineer with a background in oceanography. She started her career in plankton ecology and harmful algae, then transitioned into informatics while working on the Encyclopedia of Life and the International Census of Marine Life. Anne operated her own data science consulting company for five years before joining TISLab. She brings many years of environmental and biodiversity science experience to the group. Read more.
Bradley A. Malin, PhD - Ethics Core, AIM-AHEAD
Vanderbilt University, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Bradley Malin is the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Computer Science, as well as Vice Chair for Research Affairs in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. His research is funded through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). His research is on the development of technologies to enable artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in the context of organizational, political, and health information architectures. He has made specific contributions in a number of areas, including distributed data processing methods for medical record linkage and predictive modeling, intelligent auditing technologies to protect electronic medical records from misuse in the context of primary care, and algorithms to formally anonymize patient information disseminated for secondary research purposes. His investigations on the empirical risks to health information re-identification have been cited by the Federal Trade Commission in the Federal Register and certain privacy enhancing technologies he developed have been featured in popular media outlets and blogs, including Nature News, Scientific American, and Wired magazine. Read more.
Monica C. Munoz-Torres, PhD (Moni) - Teaming and Standards Cores
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, Department of Biomedical Informatics
My expertise, education, and enthusiasm span genomics, biocuration, knowledge representation, and data harmonization – and the development of software tools and standards to advance these fields. The major motivations for my research are, first, to leverage the wealth of comparative genomics knowledge I’ve acquired over the past 2 decades to advance our understanding of human health and disease with translational and integrative data science – we need ALL the organisms! – and second, to continuously improve on socio-technological practices to build and coordinate research communities in these fields of study. I lead the Standards Core in the BRIDGE Center project of the NIH Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) Program, and I am the Program Director for the Phenomics First Resource, an NHGRI Center of Excellence in Genomic Science, and for the Monarch Initiative, the flagship Program of TISLab. Read more.
Trey Ideker, PhD - CM4AI
University of California, San Diego, Department of Medicine
Trey Ideker, PhD, is a UC San Diego Professor of Medicine, Bioengineering and Computer Science, and former Chief of Genetics. Dr. Ideker is the Director of the Cell Maps for AI initiative under the Bridge2AI program. Additionally, he is Director or Co-Director of the the Cancer Cell Map Initiative, the National Resource for Network Biology, the Psychiatric Cell Map Initiative and the UC San Diego PhD Program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, all NIH-funded efforts. Read more.
Aaron Lee, MD, MSc - AI-READi DGP
University of Washington, Department of Ophthalmology, Seattle, WA, USA
After finishing residency, Dr. Lee completed two fellowships in vitreoretinal diseases. He completed a medical retina fellowship at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, UK and then a surgical retina fellowship atMoorfields Eye Hospital in London, UK and then a surgical retina fellowship at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Lee is an active clinician-scientist and is actively researching application of Big Data computing techniques in the field of ophthalmology. He has been the first to apply novel visualizations from results from cloud and cluster based computing environments. Read more.
Cecilia Lee, MD, MS - AI-READi DGP
University of Washington, Department of Ophthalmology, Seattle, WA, USA
Dr. Lee joined the faculty at Washington University in 2014. She is a clinician scientist and her time is divided into seeing patients with retinal conditions, performing cataract extractions, teaching, and pursuing her research in medical retina and uveitis.
Dr. Lee offers medical treatments for vitreoretinal diseases and performs cataract surgeries. She enjoys being actively involved in clinical research and teaching residents. She is dedicated to educating her patients with the most current information and offering diverse treatment options. Read more.
Eric Rosenthal, MD - CHoRUS DGP
Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Neurology; Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Boston, MA
Eric S. Rosenthal, MD, serves as Medical Director of the Neurosciences Intensive Care Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and ICU Director of the MGH Clinical Data Animation Center. He has an appointment in the MGH Center for Neurotechnology and NeuroRecovery.
Dr. Rosenthal devotes clinical time in the MGH Neurosciences ICU and as part of the Epilepsy Service. His clinical interests include traumatic brain injury (TBI), subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), and seizure disorders in critically ill patients, including status epilepticus.
Dr. Rosenthal performs clinical research on innovative approaches that apply principles of precision medicine to neurocritical care by uniting neurologic monitoring of brain activity with contextual information such as medication time and dose information and continuous recovery data. His research spans from individual customized studies of complex individual patients to multi-center big data analyses involving up to 20,000 subjects. Read more.
Steven Bedrick, PhD - Voice DGP
Oregon Health & Science University, Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology
Associate Professor of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, School of Medicine, Center for Spoken Language Understanding, School of Medicine, Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Program, School of Medicine - Research interests include applying natural language processing techniques to a variety of biomedical problems such as clinical information retrieval, secondary analysis of electronic medical record data, and automatic assessment of neuropsychological disorders. Read more.
Harry Caufield, PhD - Standards Core
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Department of Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Projects
I combine text mining, data integration, machine learning, and network analysis methods to develop tools for understanding disease phenomena better and more easily. I've previously worked with generating and interpreting proteome, protein-protein interaction, and microbiological phenotype data, with a focus on cardiovascular disease. Read more.
Ellen Wright Clayton, M.D., J.D. - Ethics Core
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Nashville, TN
Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD, is the Craig-Weaver Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Professor of Law in the Vanderbilt University School of Law. A graduate of Duke University, Stanford University, Yale Law School, and Harvard Medical School, Professor Clayton is an internationally respected leader particularly in the field of law and genetics. Professor Clayton’s scholarship currently focuses on the translation of genomics to clinical care, and she currently is co-Principal Investigator of two grants, one involving a transdisciplinary Center for Excellence in ELSI Research addressing genomic privacy and another analyzing legal issues in liability, quality, privacy and access, and the clinical-research interface, all with the goal of developing more effective solutions. Read more.
Barbara Evans. JD, PhD - CHoRUS DGP
University of Florida, Department of Levin College of Law & Wertheim College of Engineering, Gainesville, FL
Barbara J. Evans is a Professor of Law and Stephen C. O’Connell Chair at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Professor of Engineering at the University of Florida Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. Professor Evans has published widely in law journals and peer-reviewed scientific, medical, and ethics journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics, Genetics in Medicine, American Journal of Human Genetics, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Read more.
Pamela Payne Foster, MD - CM4AI DGP
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa Regional Campus, Department of Community Medicine/Population Health, Tuscaloosa, AL
Pamela Payne Foster, MD, MPH, Project FAITHH Principal Investigator, is Professor in Community Medicine/Population Health at the University of Alabama School of Medicine – Tuscaloosa campus. Dr. Foster also serves as Deputy Director of the Institute for Rural Health Research at the institution. Dr. Foster has already begun to establish herself as a researcher in the area of stigma in rural African Americans in Alabama. Her specific areas of research include: generalized characterization of community-based stigma in rural African Americans, characterization in older HIV+ African Americans in Alabama, characterization of disclosure issues in rural African American men infected with HIV and faith-based approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention. Dr. Foster has also been involved in local and state HIV/AIDS advocacy and planning. Read more.
Parisa Rashidi, PhD - CHoRUS DGP
University of Florida, Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME)
Dr. Parisa Rashidi received her PhD in computer science with an emphasis on machine learning. She is currently an associate professor at the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at University of Florida (UF). She is also affiliated with the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), as well as Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) departments. She is the director of the “Intelligent Health Lab” (i-Heal). Her research aims to bridge the gap between machine learning and patient care. Read more.
Wei Wang, PhD – Tools Optimization & Skills and Workforce Development Cores
University of California, Los Angeles, Computer Science, Computational Medicine, Scalable Analytics Institute
Wei Wang is the Leonard Kleinrock Chair Professor in Computer Science and Computational Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi). She is also a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Graduate Program. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. She was a professor in Computer Science and a member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2002 to 2012, and was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Dr. Wang's research interests include big data analytics, data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, bioinformatics and computational biology, and computational medicine. She has filed seven patents, and has published one monograph and more than two hundred eighty research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings, including multiple best paper awards. Analytics Institute. Read more.
Toufeeq Syed, PhD - AIM-AHEAD
UTHealth Houston
Toufeeq Ahmed Syed, PhD is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Education Informatics at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston. He is also an Associate Professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. Before joining UTHealth in 2023, he was Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. Syed has more than a decade of experience serving in Informatics and Artificial Intelligence leadership roles: He was Chief Technology Officer for an NSF-funded AI startup, Founding Director and Executive Director at Health IT at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Assistant Dean of Education Informatics for Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and has developed many innovative technology platforms including VSTAR, QuizTime, TurnOut, and Spark. He has over 15 years of experience developing national online platforms. He actively leads education informatics research and innovations and is active in national and international medical education technology and data standards committees. Read more.