Faculty

Program affiliation
Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

Research summary
Our lab develops and applies informatics methods to support clinical research and learning health systems across a range of neurological and chronic disease domains. Core research areas include **computational phenotyping**, where we focus on developing, evaluating, and critically appraising algorithms that identify patient populations from large-scale EHR data; **real-world evidence generation**, where we build automated pipelines and predictive models that translate clinical data into actionable insights for care and research; and **research infrastructure for learning health systems**, where we design and evaluate the data harmonization pipelines, classification tools, and integration methods that make large-scale clinical research possible. Across all of these areas, we maintain a strong emphasis on algorithmic equity, examining how methods perform across demographic subgroups and surfacing structural disparities in access and care. These methods are applied to a broad set of clinically significant conditions—including diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, ALS, movement disorders, and epilepsy—that share common informatics challenges such as diagnostic uncertainty, heterogeneous data, and underrepresented populations. Trainees gain hands-on experience in EHR-based cohort construction, multimodal data integration, algorithm development and validation, and the translation of informatics tools into practice, with opportunities to collaborate with clinical experts across these domains.

Key words
precision medicine, ehr, data science, phenotyping, informatics

Program affiliation
Neurosciences
Developmental Regenerative and Stem Cell Biology

Research summary
Strategies to improve outcomes of nervous system injury and disease, regeneration and preservation

Key words

Program affiliation
Developmental Regenerative and Stem Cell Biology
Biochemistry Biophysics and Structural Biology

Research summary
Role of transcription factors in differentiation and development

Key words
embryonic development, lung development, mouse models, transcriptional regulation

Program affiliation
Neurosciences

Research summary
Mechanisms of epileptogenesis and seizure-induced brain injury

Key words
epilepsy, glia, imaging, multi-photon microscopy, neurophysiology

Program affiliation
Molecular Cell Biology
Neurosciences

Research summary
Repair and regeneration following nerve injury and soft tissue injury

Key words
Plastic Surgery, Peripheral nerve, Regeneration, Tissue Engineering, Biomaterials

Program affiliation
Immunology
Neurosciences

Research summary
Inflammation and autoimmunity of the central nervous system

Key words
antigen presentation, dendritic cells, B cells, immunology, intravital microscopy, multiple sclerosis, neurobiology

Program affiliation
Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis
Immunology
Computational and Systems Biology
Molecular Genetics and Genomics

Research summary
We investigate the interplay among the microbiota, stromal cells, and the immune system through the integration of microbiology and immunology with systems biology.

Key words
Microbiota, Microbiome, Immune system, Stromal cells, Vaccines, Germinal Centers

Program affiliation
Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis
Immunology
Computational and Systems Biology
Molecular Genetics and Genomics

Research summary
Host-microbe dynamics during pregnancy

Key words
virome, microbiome, pregnancy, papillomavirus, herpesvirus

Program affiliation
Biochemistry Biophysics and Structural Biology
Neurosciences
Molecular Cell Biology
Cancer Biology

Research summary
Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease, central nervous disorders, postmortem biomarker validation and characterization, in vivo positron emission tomography, in vitro quantitative autoradiography

Key words
Imaging, biomarkers, cancer, neuroscience, PET, quantitative autoradiography, pharmaceuticals, biological assays, human brain function and disease

Program affiliation
Neurosciences

Research summary
Development and applications of quantitative MRI-based methods and Machine Learning tools for in vivo studying of humans and animals in health and disease

Key words
brain structure and function, Alzheimer`s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, MRI, fMRI, GEPCI, hyperpolarized gas, biophysics, mathematical modeling, Machine Learning