In addition to working with great students in a formal classes, I have the privilege of working with fantastic doctoral students including : Ryan Wang, George Vazquez, Don Keefer, and Jaemin Yang.
Ryan Wang, Information Sciences. Ryan is interested in Biomedical informatics, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
George Vazquez, Information Sciences. George’s overarching research interest is to use data science to address social and environmental justice issues affecting marginalized communities. His current research focuses on the use of text mining on medical literature to study the body’s exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals as well as their association with various bodily functions and illnesses. Other environmental health factors, such as water quality and air pollution, will be taken into consideration when examining the influence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on a community’s health.
Jaemin Yang, Informatics. Jaemin leverages probabilistic risk assessment approaches that have been developed in nuclear energy in a health care setting.
Don Keefer, Informatics. Don is interested in studying knowledge acquisition in the cognitive methods geologists use both when developing conceptual models, and when classifying observational data according to these conceptual models. He is particularly interested in improving our operational understanding of the propagation of uncertainty within geologic reasoning when it is expressed in maps and models.
Graduated Doctoral Students
I served as primary advisor for these independent researchers who have all gone on to bigger and better things: Jooho, Henry, and Ana
Dr. Jooho Lee, Dissertation: Using Grant Applications to Measure the Evolution of Collaborative and Non-collaborative Research (2020, here). Dr. Lee is now a Semantic Engineer at the University of Chicago, Pediatric Cancer Data Commons.
Dr. Henry Gabb, Dissertation: An informatics approach to prioritizing risk assessment for chemicals and chemical combinations based on near-field exposure from consumer products (2019, here). Dr. Gabb is now a senior principal engineer at Intel Corporation.
Dr. Ana Lucic, Dissertation: Summarization of Biomedical Texts by Utilizing the Information Extracted from Comparative Sentences (2017, here). Dr. Lucic is now a staff research scientist at UIUC Applied Research Institute within the Grainger College of Engineering (see her profile)
Former Doctoral Students
Mark Moran, Informatics, Mark’s research is focused on using a range of text-mining techniques to study the content of the Chief Executive’s Annual Letter for large, US-based, publicly-traded companies, and how it relates to the company’s operating performance, stock performance, and intangible assets. Mark is a part-time PhD student. For his full-time job he has two roles: Head of the John Deere Technology Innovation Center in University of Illinois Research Park, and the Lead the Advanced Sensing team for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group.