Oct. 24, 2023

Trevor Mandy

As a Columbia Native I’ve been lucky enough to call Mizzou my home for 26 years! Coming from a background in healthcare management and finance, my focus area is health and biomedical informatics. My research interests include the application of AI models to large-scale EHR data to predict clinical outcomes and derive the cost-effectiveness of clinical practices. Currently, I am researching the effectiveness of Ivacaftor and the rest of the -caftor family of medications in their ability to moderate weight gain/loss in patients with Cystic Fibrosis, as compared to traditional interventions such as high-fat diets and therapeutic interventions. Towards the…

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)…

March 17, 2021

Xing Song

My research interests are in biomedical informatics, machine learning and statistical learning algorithms, data mining and knowledge discovery. My long-term research goal is to use novel computational algorithms to discover clinically meaningful knowledge from integrated healthcare databases and apply that knowledge to understand and improve population health. I joined University of Kansas Medical Center in September 2017 for postdoctoral training in medical informatics, where I developed various machine learning models for predicting chronic kidney disease onset in the diabetic population from electronic medical records (EMRs) and a robust risk factor identification framework based on EMRs and external registries. As a…

Dec. 16, 2020

Rene Cortese

Rene Cortese, PhD, studies epigenetics of complex diseases to detect and understand how complex diseases develop, progress, are inherited, and can be treated. His main research interests are: i) Multiomics studies on phenotype modulation in Children’s and Women’s Health, ii) Epigenetics mechanisms involved in the Developmental Origin of Diseases, iii) Epigenomics of Sleep Disorders, and iv) Epigenomics profiling in circulating DNA in bodily fluids. Dr. Cortese received his MSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and earned his PhD at the University of Bonn, in Bonn, Germany. He did his Post-doctoral Fellowship in…

Oct. 23, 2020

Kate Trout

Large scale datasets collected by Information Technologies have continued to have an increasing role in nearly every sector of the economy over the past decade and will continue to do so in the next. Despite national goals of achieving interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) and enhanced clinical decision making, health data remains fragmented. Dr. Trout’s research interest lies at the intersection of Public Health, Health Policy, and Health Informatics to develop novel, data-driven approaches to rural health issues. Dr. Trout is a health services researcher and epidemiologist with research focusing on the utilization of Health Information Technologies (HITs) such…

Oct. 20, 2020

Iris Zachary

Iris Zachary is an Associate Research Professor with a focus on cancer informatics. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Informatics at the University of Missouri. She has collaborated with nationally recognized leaders in cancer research and has presented her research at regional, national and international meetings of, among others, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the National Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR), the World Cancer Congress (WCC), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the American Public Health Association (APHA). Dr. Zachary’s cancer informatics research extends precision cancer surveillance, cancer informatics, and public health informatics.

Oct. 14, 2020

Jussuf T. Kaifi

As a surgeon scientist, Chief of the Division for Cardiothoracic Surgery and co-Director for Clinical Trials at Ellis Fischel Cancer Center at the University of Missouri, my overarching goal is to translate basic science discovery into improved clinical care for patients suffering from lung cancer. I have spent my career studying solid cancers using cancer mouse models and liquid biomarkers. My efforts in this field of translational cancer research have resulted in >125 peer-reviewed publications. I initiated investigator-initiated observational clinical trials involving biospecimens at the University of Missouri (NCT02838836) and the Truman VA (NCT03551951) that led to several recent publications…

May 4, 2020

Praveen Rao

Dr. Praveen Rao is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Missouri (MU). His research interests are in the areas of big data management, data science, health informatics, and cybersecurity. He directs the Scalable Data Science (SDS) Lab at MU. His research, teaching, and outreach activities have been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), the University of Missouri System (Tier 1 grant, Tier 3…