Marlena Duda, PhD

Welcome! I'm Marlena Duda, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) of Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, and Emory. I earned my PhD in bioinformatics and Masters in applied statistics at the University of Michgan, supervised by Dr. Chandra Sripada and Dr. Danai Koutra.

My research interests lie broadly in the space of dynamic functional connectivity, both in methods development for better uncovering time-varying patterns within brain networks, as well as in understanding the role of such functional dynamics in behavior and disease. Much of my work sits at the intersection of neuroimaging, time series analysis, network science and machine learning.

News

  • September 2021: Joined the TReNDS Center as a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Dr. Vince Calhoun.

  • August 2021: 🎓Graduated from University of Michigan with my PhD in Bioinformatics and my Masters in Applied Statistics.

  • July 2021: 🧠Successfully defended my PhD dissertation, "Informed Segmentation Approaches for Studying Time-Varying Functional Connectivity in Resting State fMRI".

  • October 2020: 📖 Submitted Publication: Marlena Duda, Danai Koutra, Chandra Sripada. Validating Dynamicity in Resting State fMRI with Activation-Informed Temporal Segmentation. Preprint.

  • October 2020: Presented posters at Michigan Precision Health Symposium 2020 and Michigan AI Symposium 2020.

  • Summer 2020: Internship at Genentech: Clinical Pharmacology - Machine Learning and AI.

    • Built a pan-cancer machine learning model for tumor growth inhibition - overall survival (TGI-OS) prediction

    • Poster accepted for American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) Annual Meeting 2021. 🏅 Awarded Presidential Trainee Award and 🏅 Top Poster Ribbon.

  • July 2020: Organized virtual Girls Who Code @ UM DCMB Detroit Data Science Summer Experience coding camp.

  • June 2020: Presented poster at Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Annual Meeting (virtual).

  • November 2019: Contributed to writing: U of M Precision Health Investigator Award, "Characterizing and Understanding Time-varying Functional Connectivity States via Network Science and Deep Neural Networks". PI Danai Koutra, Co-I Chandra Sripada.

  • October 2019: Completed my first ever Chicago Marathon! 🏃🏼‍♀️

  • September 2019: Won 🏅 top poster award at ACNN Big Data Neuroscience Workshop for my poster and lightning talk: "Data-Driven Approaches for Investigating Functional Connectivity Dynamics in Resting State fMRI"

  • August 2019: 📖 Co-authored Publication: Yujun Yan, Jiong Zhu, Marlena Duda, Eric Solarz, Chandra Sripada and Danai Koutra. 2019. Interpretable Neural Network-based Classification of Limited, Noisy Brain Data. In KDD '19: The 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, August 4-8, 2019, Anchorage, AK, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (Accepted).

  • July 2019: Hosted the first annual Girls Who Code @ UM DCMB Detroit Data Science Summer Experience week-long coding camp.

  • July 2019: Presented my poster "Data-Driven Approaches for Investigating Functional Connectivity Dynamics in Resting State fMRI" at the Michigan Neuroscience Conference in Ann Arbor, MI.