Published on April 14, 2021
Updated on Dec. 19, 2023
Ms. Islam is originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She graduated with a bachelors (2012) and a masters degree (2014) in Applied Statistics from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh). She worked as a teaching faculty in Applied Statistics at the same institution from 2015 to 2018. She was also appointed as an academic advisor of the department during that time. Her experience in teaching various data analytics courses motivated her to move to US to study informatics. She graduated with a M.S. in Health Informatics from MU in 2020 and started her PhD at IDSI in the same year.
Her research interests include optimizing EHR feature usage in predicting clinical outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown potential in predicting clinical outcomes, but traditional machine learning models often overlook the temporal and contextual information present in EHR data, which is further complicated by irregular visit intervals and sparse data. The recent progress in Generative AI models, particularly Transformers, has opened up new possibilities for enhancing feature representation learning. However, there remains a scarcity of research exploring the potential of leveraging these powerful Large Language Models specifically for multimodal EHR data. Her current research efforts are aimed to to develop a deep multimodal representation learning architecture using Bidirectional Transformers to predict the multimorbid risk of four major complications in diabetes patients, including eye diseases (retinopathy, macular edema, cataracts, and glaucoma), kidney disease (nephropathy), nerve damage (neuropathy), and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE). The research aims to improve the early identification of at-risk patients for multiple complications, enabling timely intervention and enhanced diabetes care.
During her time at MU IDSI, Ms. Islam won various competitions including the 2021 AMIA Student Design Challenge, 2022 Best Student Paper (1st Place) Award at Informatics Summit, 2022 Best Poster Presentation (2nd Place) at Annual RCAF, and various travel grants and travel scholarships (including AMIA Lead Fund Scholarship in 2022). She was elected as the President for MUIDSI Graduate Student Org (GSO) from 2022-2023. During her presidential term, she chaired the 11th Annual Missouri Data Science and Informatics Symposium (2022) and the Show Me Research AI Hackathon (2023). She is currently serving as the chair-elect for the Student Working Group at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). In 2023, she also was honored with the Mizzou 18 Award by the Mizzou Alumni Association for her academic achievements, leadership, service to Mizzou and contribution towards the informatics community as a graduate student at MU.