Friday, January 22 

"An Evidence-based Network Approach to Recommending Targeted Cancer Therapies"
Simina Boca, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Oncology and Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics
Georgetown University Medical Center

December 11, 2020

"Meta-Learning for Cancer Prediction and Survival Analysis"
Aidong Zhang, Ph.D.
Professor
Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering
University of Virginia

November 13, 2020

"Application of Single-Cell Data Analysis in Autoimmune Disease"
Min Gao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine - Cardiovascular Disease
Associate Scientist
Informatics Institute

October 30, 2020

"Lessons from COVID-19: How Are Data Science and AI Changing Future Biomedical Research?"
Jake Chen, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics and Computer Science
Associate Director of Informatics Institute
Chief Bioinformatics Officer
UAB School of Medicine

October 23, 2020

"Getting to the Edge of Biological Networks"
Shahid M. Mukhtar, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Departments of Biology and Surgery
Scientist
Nutrition Obesity Research Center
UAB School of Medicine

October 9, 2020

"Genomic Tools for Third-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis"
Zechen Chong, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Genetics and Scientist
Informatics Institute
UAB School of Medicine

September 25, 2020

"Community-Relative Distance with Applications to Bioinformatics"
Ryan Melvin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Surgery
Department of Anesthesiology
UAB School of Medicine

September 11, 2020

"Understanding the Impact of Social Determinants of Health on the COVID-19 Pandemic"
Ramaraju Rudraraju, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Surgery
Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery
UAB School of Medicine

May 8, 2020

“From ‘Big Data’ to ‘Little Data’ — From Information Disarray to Action”
William M. Tierney, M.D.
Professor, Department of Population Health
Chair, Department of Population Health
Dell Medical School
The University of Texas at Austin

April 24, 2020

“De-identification of UAB Clinical Text using Transfer Learning”
John D. Osborne, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
UAB Department of Medicine
Informatics Institute

April 10, 2020

“Bioinformatics for B-Cell Receptor Repertoire Sequencing Studies”
Alexander Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Microbiology
Scientist
Informatics Institute
UAB School of Medicine

March 27, 2020

"Mining and Prediction of Gene Functions for Systematic Study of the Genotype-Phenotype Map"
Nilesh Kumar
Ph.D. Student
UAB Department of Biology

"The Systeomics of Arsenical Injury"
Bharat Mishra 
Ph.D. Student
UAB Department of Biology

March 6, 2020

Topic: “The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak and Data-driven Healthcare: An Informatics Perspective”
Speaker: Jake Chen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Department of Genetics, Chief Bioinformatics Officer, Associate Director
Informatics Institute, UAB School of Medicine

February 14, 2020

Topic: "Deep Learning-driven Distance-based Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction"
Speaker: Jianlin Cheng, Ph.D.
Affiliation: William and Nancy Thompson Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri

January 24, 2020

Topic: "Omics Approaches for Insight to Skeletal Muscle Wasting and Weight Loss in COPD"
Speaker: Merry-Lynn McDonald, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director of Integrative ‘Omics and Assistant Professor, UAB Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine

January 10, 2020

Topic: "Genomics, Machine Learning, and Osteoporosis Risk Assessment"
Speaker: Qing Wu, ScD, MSPH, MS, MB
Affiliation: Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, School of Public Health and Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

December 13, 2019

Topic: "Research Computing: Building Gateways To Science"
Speaker: Ralph Zottola, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Vice-President for Researching Computing, Chief Architect for UAB Research Computing Applications

November 22, 2019

Topic: "Polygenic Risk Scores: Are They GPS for Clinical Practice?"
Speaker: Hemant Tiwari, Ph.D. 
Affiliation: William “Student” Sealy Gosset Endowed Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Section on Statistical Genetics, UAB School of Public Health

October 25, 2019

Topic: "AI-Informatics in Biomedicine: Find the Balance in Marriage"
Speaker: Thanh Nguyen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Postdoctoral Fellow, UAB Informatics Institute

October 11, 2019

Topic: "Control-Alter-Delete: Gene Regulatory Mechanisms in Brain Function and Disease"
Speaker: Jeremy Day Ph.D.
Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, UAB School of Medicine

September 13, 2019

Topic: "Bioinformatics for Single-cell Analysis: A Review of Computational Biology Trends and Application Opportunities"
Speaker: Jake Chen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor, UAB School of Medicine, Department of Genetics and Computer Science, Associate Director of Informatics Institute, Chief Bioinformatics Officer

May 24, 2019

Topic: "Predicting genetic effect of missense variants using deep learning"
Speaker: Yufeng Shen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Systems Biology, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

May 10, 2019

Topic: "A New Mathematical Framework for Convergence Computations"
Speaker: Murat Tanik, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor and Chair, UAB Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wallace R. Bunn Chair of Telecommunications

April 26, 2019

Topic: "Whole-exome sequencing approach to select genes related to left ventricular hypertrophy in African Americans." 
Speaker: Ryan Irvin, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, UAB

March 22, 2019

Topic: "Privacy-preserving Techniques for Sharing and Analyzing Human Genomic Data"
Speaker: Casey Greene, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology, University of Pennsylvania

February 8, 2019

Topic: "Strategies to Study Rare Diseases with 'Big Data'"
Speaker: Haixu Tang, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director, Data Science Academic Programs, Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington

January 25, 2019

Topic: "Biological discoveries through bioinformatics analysis and research"
Speaker: Sheng Liu, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Junior Faculty, Indiana University Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics

January 11, 2019

Topic: "L-2-Hydroxyglutarate in Renal Cancer: Epigenetic Mechanisms and Liabilities"
Speaker: Sunil Sudarshan, M.D.
Affiliation: Associate Professor, UAB Department of Urology

December 14, 2018

Topic:  "The UAB Undiagnosed Diseases Program: Bioinformatic Applications in Rare Disorders" 
Speaker:  Bruce Korf, M.D., Ph.D.
Affiliation: Wayne H. and Sara Crews Finley Chair in Medical Genetics, Chief Genomics Officer, UAB Medicine, Co-Director, UAB-HudsonAlpha Center for Genomic Medicine, Associate Director for Rare Diseases, Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine Institute

November 16, 2018

Topic: “From linear organization to the 3D genome architecture” 
Speaker: Yichao Li, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Research Assistant, Ohio University School of Engineering and Computer Science

October 26, 2018

Topic: "Exploring the -Omics of Glioblastoma Using Patient-Derived Models of Cancer"
Speaker: Christopher Willey, M.D., Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director, UAB Kinome Core, Associate Professor, UAB Radiation Oncology

October 12, 2018

Topic: "Unraveling the meiotic recombination landscape in individual human genomes"
Speaker: Peng Xu, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Postdotoral Fellow, UAB Informatics Institute

September 28, 2018

Topic: "From chaos, DRAMA: Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis"
Speaker: Jeremy Blackburn, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, UAB Department of Computer Science

September 14, 2018

Topic: “Computational prediction and modeling for protein-drug and protein-protein interactions”
Speaker: Daisuke Kihara, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University

August 24, 2018

Topic: "Deep Learning and Clustering Algorithms for Protein Scoring"
Speaker: Debswapna Bhattacharya, PhD
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Auburn University

August 10, 2018

Topic: "Context fear memory formation is regulated by hippocampal lncRNA-mediated histone methylation changes"
Speaker: Anderson Butler 
Affiliation: Ph.D. candidate in GBS Cell, Molecular & Developmental Biology Program and Graduate student in Lubin Lab

July 27, 2018

Topic: "HLA Population Genetics and Informatics to Optimize the Kidney Allocation System"
Speaker: Loren Gragert, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Tulane University

July 22, 2018

Topic: "Predicting regulatory variants with large-scale multi-omics data"
Speaker: Li Chen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Auburn University

July 13, 2018

Topic: "Implementation of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Testing in Precision Oncology Advantages and Challenges"
Speaker: Shuko Harada, MD
Affiliation: Associate Professor, UAB Pathology

May 25, 2018

Topic: "Towards the ultimate diagnostics: NGS of immune repertoire"
Speaker: Jian Han, MD, PhD
Affiliation: Faculty Investigator, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

May 11, 2018

Topic: "Comparative and evolutionary genomics of allelic imbalance in mammals"
Speaker: Xu Wang, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Auburn University

April 27, 2018

Topic: "Integrating high-throughput drug screening with targeted deep sequencing reveals novel treatment strategies for chemoresistant acute myeloid leukemia"
Speaker: Miranda Burnette, Ph.D.
Affiliation: T32 Fellow, UAB Department of Microbiology

March 23, 2018

Topic: "An Introduction to Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis"
Speaker: Lloyd J. Edwards, PhD
Affiliation: Professor and Chair, Deparment of Biostatistics School of Public Health

Abstract: Longitudinal studies, in which outcomes are measured repeatedly over time on the same subject, are widely conducted in various applications and often provide better insights about the processes of interest than cross-sectional studies. Longitudinal studies allow addressing questions about changes over time in the response and changes in the relationship of the response to subjects' characteristics. We present an introduction to applied longitudinal data analysis that is meant to introduce features of longitudinal data and available statistical techniques for analyzing the data.

March 9, 2018

Topic: "Roles of Alternative Splicing in Complex Diseases"
Speaker: Yunlong Liu, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Indiana University School of Medicine

February 23, 2018

Topic: Integrating multidimensional data to catalyze translation of GWAs finds to biology and therapeutics
Speaker: Bingshan Li,PhD    
Affiliation: Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University

Bio: Dr. Bingshan Li is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt Genetics Institute. Dr. Li’s research is focused on developing statistical methods and computational tools to understand genetics of human complex traits. Dr. Li is a pioneer in the development of gene-based collapsing methods for analyzing rare variants (almost 10 years ago), which laid a foundation for sequencing data analysis for complex traits. As a result, he received the C.W. Cotterman Award by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2009. He is now focused on developing methods for analyzing noncoding rare variants in whole genome sequencing (WGS) data. Dr. Li is a PI of one of the three Analysis Centers for the Genome Sequencing Program, which is to carry out whole genome sequencing over >100,000 samples across multiple complex diseases. 

Abstract: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous variants associated with schizophrenia (SCZ). Translating GWAS findings to biological mechanisms, especially clinical applicability, however, remains a major challenge. In this talk, I will introduce a statistical framework that integrates multiple -omics data to identify SCZ risk genes based on GWAS findings. The risk genes identified are highly consistent with the leading pathophysiological hypotheses of SCZ, specifically expressed in brain tissues, and enriched in de novo mutations in a broader range of psychiatric disorders (e.g. autism, developmental diseases and intellectual disability). Furthermore, the risk genes are enriched in drug targets, providing candidate genes for therapeutic development. We further investigated the expression patterns of risk genes across multiple tissue- and cell type-specific transcriptomic data, and used machine learning approaches to build models to predict risk genes across the genome

February 9, 2018

Topic: Genomic disgnosis of developmental diabilities   
Speaker: Greg Cooper, PhD 
Affiliation: Faculty Investigator, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

January 26, 2018

Topic: Impact of rare variants on eft ventrivular traits in African American using WGS 
Speaker: Rafet Al-Tobasei, PhD
Affiliation: T32 Fellow, UAB Department of Biostatistics

January 12, 2018

Topic: Intergrative Anlaysis of Cancer Progression
Speaker: Sooryanarayana Varambally, PhD
Affiliation: Associate Professor, UAB Department of Pathology

December 15, 2017

Topic: Hierarchical Models for Complex Molecular Data Analysis
Speaker: Nengjun Yi, PhD  
Affiliation: Professor, UAB Department of Biostatistics

November 11, 2017

Topic: System for Big Data Analytics
Speaker: Da Yan, PhD
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, UAB Department of Computer Science

October 13, 2017

Topic: Framework for multidimensional data intergration in complex human diseases
Speaker: Brittany Lasseigne, Phd
Affiliation: Senior Scientist, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Friday, January 15

"Public Health Informatics in the Time of COVID-19"
Nicholas Soulakis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine (Health and Biomedical Informatics, Epidemiology) and Medical Social Sciences
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Chief Public Health Informatics Advisor
Chicago Department of Public Health
Epidemiologist
Illinois Department of Public Health

December 18, 2020

"Facilitating collaborative research: data harmonization and pooling"
Eneida A. Mendonca, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP, FACMI
Vice President for Research Development
Interim Director
Center for Biomedical Informatics
Regenstrief Institute
Professor of Pediatrics and Biostatistics
Indiana University School of Medicine

December 04, 2020

“A Critical Analysis of COVID-19 Research Literature: Text Mining Approach”
Ferhat Zengul, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Health Services Administration
School of Health Professions 

Nurettin Oner, Ph.D., MHA
Research Associate
Health Services Administration
School of Health Professions

Bunyamin Ozaydin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Health Services Administration
School of Health Professions

November 20, 2020

“Biomedical Informatics Year in Review”
James Cimino, M.D., FACMI, FACP
Professor
Department of Medicine
Division of General Internal Medicine
Director
Informatics Institute
UAB School of Medicine

November 6, 2020

“Are We Talking About the Same Patient? Studying Nurse-Physician Language Differences”
Andrew Boyd, M.D.
Associate Professor
Biomedical and Health Information Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago

October 2, 2020

"The Peril and Promise of Clinical Informatics"
David M. Liebovitz, M.D.
Co-Director, Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine - Center for Medical Education in Data Science and Digital Health
Associate Vice Chair for Clinical Informatics, Department of Medicine
Associate Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics)
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

April 17, 2020

Topic: “The Role of Telehealth in Reducing Health Disparities”
Speaker: Mohanraj Thirumalai, Ph.D., MEng, MS
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Health Services Administration, UAB School of Health Professions

February 21, 2020

Topic: "Diagnostic Decision Support Systems: An Educational Intervention to Increase Use"
Speaker: Eta Berner, Ed.D.
Affiliation: Professor, UAB School of Health Professions, Director of the UAB Center for Health Informatics for Patient Safety/Quality

January 31, 2020

Topic: "Re-Envisioning Informatics in Nursing Education for 2020 and Beyond"
Speaker: Marisa L. Wilson, DNSc, MHSc, RN, CPHIMS, RN-BC, FAAN
Affiliation: Associate Profesor of Nursing, Director, Nursing Academic Affairs, Coordinator, Informatics Specialty Track, Director, Health Systems Leadership Pathway, UAB School of Nursing

January 17, 2020

Topic: "The ‘F Word’ in FAIR – Finding Objects in the Scientific Record to Enable Research Synthesis and Inform Clinical Practice"
Speaker: Kathryn Kaiser, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Health Behavior, UAB School of Public Health, Senior Scientist, Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research and Education (COERE), Scientist, Nutrition Obesity Research Center (NORC)

December 6, 2019

Topic: "Biomedical Informatics Year in Review"
Speaker: James Cimino, M.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Department of Medicine, Director, Informatics Institute, UAB School of Medicine

November 1, 2019

Topic: "A Design Science Approach to Community-Based Participatory Research: An Information System for Certified Peer Specialists in Opioid Use Disorder"
Speaker: Sue Feldman, RN, MEd, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs in Health Informatics, Health Services Administration, UAB School of Health Professions

October 18, 2019

Topic: "Using Industrial Engineering and Lean Techniques to Mitigate Burnout in Care Teams"
Speaker: Daniel Silva, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering, Auburn University

October 4, 2019

Topic: "Transforming Cancer Clinical Research & Care Delivery through Clinical Informatics"
Speaker: Wayne Liang, M.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, UAB School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Informatics Institute 

September 6, 2019

Topic: "Transitioning from one EHR to Another: Opportunities and Challenges"
Speaker: Amy Y. Wang, M.D., MBI
Affiliation: Associate Professor, UAB School of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Informatics Institute 

April 5, 2019

Topic: “Concepts, Relations, and Properties of a Clinical Ontology”
Speaker: Irushi Dissanayake
Affiliation: Postdoctoral Researcher, UAB Informatics Institute

March 15, 2019

Topic: "Toward Designing Smarter Electronic Clinical Documentation Systems"
Speaker: Tiago Colicchio, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Informatics Institute, UAB

March 1, 2019

Topic: “Gamification, patient reported outcomes and patient based metrics”
Speaker: James, Willig, M.D., MSPH
Affiliation: Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases, UAB Department of Medicine

February 15, 2019

Topic: "Population Genomics and Gene Expression Data Analysis"
Speaker: Linyong Mao, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Howard University

February 1, 2019

Topic: “Clinical Bioinformatics Methods to Study Genomic Mutational Profiles in Cancer Disease”
Speaker: Yvonne Edwards, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director of Bioinformatics, Program in Molecular Medicine and Research, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School

January 18, 2019

Topic: "Actually See Your Patient, Not Just Inside Them: A New Technology and Paradigm for Medical Imaging Care"
Speaker: Srini Tridandapani, M.D., Ph.D., MBA
Affiliation: Vice Chair, Imaging Informatics, Professor, Department of Radiology- Cardiopulmonary Section 

January 4, 2019

Topic: “Incorporating CMS Medicare Cost Report data into Health Services Research Data Infrastructure”
Speaker: Bunyamin Ozaydin, Ph.D.
Affiliation:  Assistant Professor, UAB School of Health Professions

December 7, 2018

Topic: "Quality Improvement with CDW Mining, Graph-Network Analysis & Visualization: The INFECTALYTICS Project"
Speaker:  Allen Bryan, M.D., Ph.D.
Affiliation:  Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Division of Laboratory Medicine

November 30, 2018

Topic: "Investigating the Use of Patient Attributes to Predict False-Positive Medical Alerts" 
Speaker: Tim Kennell
Affiliation: M.D./Ph.D. Student, UAB, GBS

November 9, 2018

Topic: "Biomedical Informatics Year in Review"
Speaker: James J. Cimino, M.D.
Affiliation: Director, UAB Informatics Institute, Professor of Medicine

November 2, 2018

Topic: "Informatics in Precision Medicine: When Data Is the Drug"
Speaker: Matthew Might, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Director, UAB Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute, Professor of Medicine

October 19, 2018

Topic: “Beyond Patient Portals: Informatics Support for Patient Engagement in the Inpatient Setting”
Speaker: Wayne Liang, M.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, UAB Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology 

October 5, 2018

Topic: "Physician Performance and Preference for Clinical Data in Structured and Unstructured Formats."
Speaker: Eta Berner, Ed.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Director, Center for Health Informatics for Patient Safety/Quality UAB School of Health Professions

September 5, 2018

Topic:“Putting the “Why” in “EHR”: Toward the Development of an Ontology for  Representing Clinical Reasoning in Clinical Notes”
Speaker:  Jim Cimino, M.D., FACMI, FACP
Affiliation: Professor, Director-Informatics Institute, Co-Director-Center for Clinical and Translational Science