Informatics for Human Flourishing @UBMC

I am an Assistant Professor at Department of Information Systems at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). My research interest is in Informatics for Human Flourishing. I am passionate about creating data-enabled human-centered technology and systems that promote human flourishing. My major areas of investigation have been healthcare and education and I am working on new collaborative project caring for caregivers in long-term care facility.

My academic background is in applied machine learning, statistics, data mining, analytics and visualization. Before I joined UMBC in August 2020, I spent about 15 years at the Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon University under the guidance of Dr. Artur Dubrawski. During those formative years, I have the fortune to be immersed in the culture of relentless drive for real-world impact via use-inspired research.

I received my Ph.D in Information Systems from School of Information Systems & Management at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. I was a fellow of PIER ( Program of Interdisciplinary Educational Research) funded by US Department of Education. My Ph.D advisor is Artur Dubrawski and my PIER/educational research advisor is Amy Ogan. My Ph.D work centered around analyzing sensor data that describes the complex fine-grained physiological process (of patients in healthcare domain) or psychological process (of students in education domain). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to augment human perceptual and reasoning capability for service providers with high cognitive loads: critical care nurses and school teachers. Building upon those work, I am looking into new ways of leveraging data and analytics to augment human intelligence, promote well-being and ultimately support flourishing with service providers from various domain of work.

I received master degrees in Information Systems (MISM, 2004) and Statistics (2012), both from Carnegie Mellon University. My undergraduate degree is in international business and computer science (double major), from Shanghai Jiaotong University, P.R.China.

In my previous life, I was a professional accountant (CPA) for a big 4 accounting firm and a financial analyst with a Fortune 500 company. I also had a short stint with journalism. I was part of the project team that researched and produced the one of the first list of Chinese entrepreneurs ("Forbes China rich list") back in 2002.