June 24, 2025

Randi Foraker

Dr. Foraker is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics & Medical Epidemiology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. She is trained as an epidemiologist and holds fellowships in the American Heart Association, American Medical Informatics Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Foraker specializes in the design of population-based studies and the integration of electronic health record data with socioeconomic indicators as well as the use of synthetic data for research. Her recent research has focused on the application of clinical decision support – embedded in the electronic health record – to…

June 23, 2025

Qian Liu

Dr. Liu received her Ph.D. degree of Earth System and Geoinformation Science in May 2022 from George Mason University (GMU). Her research focuses on four aspects: 1. Climate and atmospheric factor detection, segmentation, and retrieval using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies; 2. Spatiotemporal theories and analysis in big earth data; 3. Remote sensing and climate/environmental data record processing and generation; 4. The ability of using the above to solve pressing issues in extreme weather events, climate change and natural disasters.

June 18, 2025

Joe Emanuel

Joe Emanuel is a PhD Student in Informatics. His research interests include geospatial data privacy, differential privacy, and cybersecurity.

July 3, 2024

Erfan Zareei

Erfan Zareei is a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he is a member of Dr. Chi-Ren Shyu’s research team. He completed his Bachelor’s degree at the Sharif University in Iran and his Master’s at the University of Missouri, Columbia. In his current role, Erfan is engaged in research focusing on the application of LLM in Geospatial Informatics. His previous research includes studying virus spread in wetlands, analyzing fish behavior in stagnant water, quantifying microplastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems, and simulating particle cloud behavior in fluids with image processing and CFD simulation. With a passion for Data…

Nov. 30, 2023

Mitchell Pillarick III

First and foremost, Mitch Pillarick is a loving husband to his wife Vanessa, and a caring father to his three children. Mitch is an Eagle Scout with the Vigil Honor. He was commissioned  as a US Army Officer in 2008 where he continues his service in the Reserves. Since 2010, Mitch has worked in the fields of Geospatial Analysis, Imagery Analysis, Web Development, Systems Engineering, Data Science, and Data Engineering. The focus  of his research is operationalizing and optimizing computer vision workflows against  remote  sensing  satellite imagery leveraging a novel Machine Learning Operations platform.

Nov. 27, 2023

Sue Brownawell

Sue Brownawell is pursuing an informatics PhD at the University of Missouri, in the Institute for Data Science and Informatics. Her research interests aim to advance methods in causal inference though geospatial context, resulting in novel approaches for inferring causality. Geospatial information is a key factor affecting the proliferation and evolution of diseases; spatial context includes the critical, interdependent factors of air, water, and soil parameters, socio-economic characteristics, human geography, and infrastructure. Analyzing these factors enlightens our understanding of disease incidence and informs sound policy in its management and control. Though most models in data science and informatics are causal…

Nov. 27, 2023

Christopher Algire

Chris is a PhD student at the University of Missouri’s Institute for Data Science and Informatics. His research interests explore the intersection of Informatics and machine learning. He seeks to advance machine learning algorithms through novel methods using a multi-disciplinary approach, with an emphasis on the role of Informatics in optimizations and representations. His previous experience in industry and government focused on multi-modal data fusion. He implemented agent-based systems and evolutionary algorithms at IBM before working on NLP applications. He also implemented high-performance architectures which resulted in distributed systems for the algorithms he developed. Chris also managed and led a…

Sep. 29, 2021

Hua Qin

I am an environmental and resource sociologist with emphasis on human population dynamics and sustainable development. I have a diverse academic background in sociology, demography, geography, human ecology, environmental science, as well as mixed and spatial methodological research. My interdisciplinary training and research experience focus on analyzing social and cultural aspects of natural resources and environmental systems. I was a postdoctoral research fellow supported by the NSF-funded Data Conservancy project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This project focused on data practices and curation across life, earth, and social sciences. While at NCAR, I also engaged in the…

July 29, 2021

Ram Raghavan

I am broadly interested in spatially-enabled computational epidemiology of vector-borne and infectious diseases and applications of geospatial approaches for enhancing animal/public health. I extensively use Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote-sensing concepts in my research alongside geo-statistical, correlative modeling, and Bayesian approaches for understanding spatio-temporal dynamics of non-stationary epidemiological processes. Our current and prior research has identified important spatio-temporal patterns and spatial determinants for vector/water-borne zoonotic diseases from climatic, environmental, and socio-economic themes. Increasingly, my research strives to identify consistencies in complex meteorological variable associations with vector-borne diseases through the utilization of high-resolution ground-based and NASA Earth Observing System (EOS)…