I've been teaching in classrooms since I was a graduate student in 1984. However, I feel like I really developed as a teacher, here at UW. These days, some of the key concepts that I embrace in my teaching are:
Active learning / flipped classroom / Storytelling
A brief highlight of the three courses I regularly teach:
Knowledge representation for biomedical applications. This course covers ontologies, standards, and knowledge sharing in biomedicine.
Transformational Technologies for Biology, Medicine and Health. This course is notable as an undergraduate course in biomedical informatics. Usually, the class size is 35-40 students, and deliverables include hands-on group projects and individual oral presentations (stories!).
Professional development for biomedical informatics. This course is a year-long, ungraded seminar that teaches graduate students the "un-taught" skills necessary for success as a biomedical informatician: Clear, quality scientific writing; clear, convincing oral presentations (story-telling!!), and leadership and conflict resolution skills.
A true joy in life is watching growth, and helping to nurture that growth. I am proud to have been the chair (or co-chair) of the PhD committee for 17 (seventeen!) scholars who have earned their PhD in Biomedical & Health Informatics here at the University of Washington.
PhD Graduates:
Chunhua Weng (2005) Ching-Ping Lin (2010) Max Neal (2010)
Michal Galdzicki (2012) Wynona Black (2013) Alan Kalet (2015)
Rebecca Hazen (2016) Nikhil Gopal (2017) Graham Kim (2018)
Ahmad Aljadaan (2019) Lucy Wang (2019) Ryan James (2019)
Harkirat Sohi (2022) Raghav Madan (2025) Ojas Ramwala (2025)
Yile Chen (2025) Ashmitha Rajendran (2026)
Current students:
Carolin Spice Wesley Surento Xingyu (Luna) Li Faisal Yaseen
My current students are carrying out great research in imaging informatics (e.g., for cancer detection & risk assessment), SDOH (social determinants of health), and systems biology (e.g. gene regulatory network analysis, and annotation for systems biology models). I'm always happy to mentor motivated students in BHI, regardless of specific research interests within the field.