June 18, 2025

Joe Emanuel

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

June 18, 2025

Zaynab Shakkour

I am a PhD student in Bioinformatics with a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from the University of Missouri. My scientific interests center on leveraging cutting-edge tools in bioinformatics and AI to enhance personalized diagnoses and improve treatment strategies. My current research focuses on autism and rare diseases, combining neurogenomics and informatics to uncover genetic underpinnings that enable subgroup discovery and advance precision medicine through drug repurposing. I am excited to serve as Secretary of the Graduate Student Organization and look forward to helping build a more connected and supportive student community!

June 18, 2025

Maryam Seifaddini

I’m Maryam, a researcher focused on subgroup discovery and pattern mining in health data. My work centers on developing innovative, AI-driven methods to integrate and extract meaningful insights from diverse omics datasets.

May 10, 2024

Timoteo Kelly

Timoteo Kelly is a National Science Foundation CyberCorps Scholar currently affiliated with the Mizzou Scalable Data Science Lab, where he has been contributing to research in data security and the Internet of Medical Things. Prior to this, he conducted research in mobile health and data science at Nova Southeastern University’s Department of Decision Sciences where he obtained a master’s degree in health informatics. Timoteo is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Informatics with an emphasis in the Internet of Medical Things and data security at the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

Dec. 14, 2023

Amir Habibdoust Lafmajani

I’m Amir, a PhD student in Health Informatics, and I have a background in econometrics. I love digging into the world of causality and counterfactual world. What really sparks my interest is exploring what could have happened – the “what-if” scenarios. Originally coming from econometrics, I found my way into health data science, and it feels like I’ve found my sweet spot. My research focus in combining causal inference and machine learning, with a special focus on understanding the ‘what if’ situations in health science, clinical trial, and cost-effectiveness of intervention. As I work through my PhD, I’m…

Dec. 13, 2023

Philip Amewudah

While unstructured text data seems to be challenging to analyze, they have shown to be very rich sources of clinical health information. My research area focuses on using free text data from text messages to learn domain ontology for the standardization of Nursing home care under the 4Ms (what Matters, Mentation, Medication, Mobility) framework, using pre-trained word/sentence embeddings.

Dec. 11, 2023

Kun-Yi Chen

Hello, I’m Kun-Yi from Taiwan. I’m interested in developing an artificial scientist system capable of autonomously generating innovative hypotheses, critiquing scientific literature, suggesting and executing novel experiments. I believe such a system has the potential to significantly accelerate scientific discovery and revolutionize the methodology of scientific inquiry.

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. 28, 2023

Mary York

Hi all, I’m Mary. I’m from Lonedell, a small rural town in eastern Missouri. I went into my undergraduate degree with a passion for biology and helping others. Towards the end of my degree I realized how important and abundant data is in modern biological research. So, I decided to go into a computationally heavy M.S. degree with no computational background, and it stuck! My master’s thesis was aimed at improving the classification of Alzheimers disease status from MRS derived data by using Bayesian networks to simulate new observations. I made connections in the Bioinformatics and Analytics Core throughout my…