About Me

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science (SSCDS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am also a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.  My research lab develops machine learning methods for data integration and model interpretation in biological and biomedical applications.

Prior to joining UIUC, I spent seven wonderful years at Brown University as a faculty member in Computer Science and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, where I received tenure in 2025. I did my postdoctoral research in the Noble Lab at the University of Washington. I completed my Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Virginia with Dr. Yanjun Qi as my advisor.

I have received the NHGRI Genomic Innovator Award and Brown University’s Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award for developing deep learning methods to integrate and model genomics datasets. I have also received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Brown. I recently received the NSF CAREER award for developing integrative and explainable machine learning methods for heterogeneous health-related datasets.

I am serving as the area chair for the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology research theme at the SSCDS for the current academic year (2026-2027).

Research Interests

Machine Learning, Data Mining, Computational Biology, Health Sciences

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