
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.

June 18, 2025
Tiyasha Guha
I’m Tiyasha Guha, a Master’s student in Data Science and Analytics at the University of Missouri – Columbia. As the MS Representative for the Graduate Student Organization (MUIDSI-GSO), I aim to foster collaboration among students across healthcare, engineering, and data science domains. My current research focuses on geospatial analysis of leukemia risk factors using national health datasets, and I bring prior industry experience as a Software Development Engineer. I’m passionate about applying data-driven approaches to solve real-world problems and supporting a vibrant, inclusive academic community.

Nov. 28, 2023
Deshan Wattegama
Deshan Wattegama is a Ph.D. student in the IDAS lab following a health informatics Ph.D. program. He worked as a senior software engineer for over 4 years and has domain knowledge in supply chain management, stock brokering, etc. He is interested in the usage of blockchain and AI in healthcare systems and using VR, and AR technologies to improve the quality of healthcare systems.

Dec. 28, 2016
Chi-Ren Shyu
Chi-Ren Shyu (he/him/his) is a Paul K. and Dianne Shumaker Professor in electrical engineering and computer science and serves as the director of the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics, where 60 interdisciplinary core faculty from 22 departments/schools support more than 160 graduate students in the MS degree program in Data Science & Analytics and PhD degree program in Informatics with emphasis areas in bioinformatics, health informatics and geospatial informatics. Shyu has organized and chaired technical program committees for several IEEE conferences, such as IEEE HealthCom 2011 (Columbia, Missouri), IEEE BigMM 2016 (Taipei, Taiwan), IEEE BIBM 2017 (Kansas City,…