Computational Medicine Faculty Continues to Grow
Computational Medicine continues to expand its faculty by recruiting professors with primary appointments in other departments and recent PhDs as Assistant Adjunct Professors. The new faculty complement the research of our current faculty and students and contribute to the community by serving on committees and participating in CGSI and other activities. Their affiliation with Comp Med also supports collaboration across disciplines, departments, and schools.
Bolei Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department (School of Engineering) and joined Computational Medicine in 2022. His research interest lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine autonomy, focusing on enabling interpretable and trustworthy human-AI interaction. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2018.
Elior Rahmani (Asst. Adjunct Professor) works on the development of novel machine-learning methods and statistical models for capturing hidden signals from high-dimensional genomic and clinical data for enabling robust and replicable analysis in the presence of unknown confounding effects. Elior earned his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA. He completed postdoctoral training in computational biology at UC Berkeley.
Brunilda (Bruna) Balliu joined UCLA in 2018 as an Independent Fellow in Computational Medicine, and in 2022, was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, with a secondary appointment in Computational Medicine. Her research focuses on the development of novel statistical methodologies and computational tools for analyzing sparsely and irregularly sampled high-dimensional functional data such as those arising from high-throughput genomic assays, mobile phone sensors, and electronic health records. She applies these methods to understand the genetic, molecular, cellular, and environmental mechanisms underlying complex human traits and diseases. Dr. Balliu is especially interested in understanding how context-specific genetic regulation relates to metabolic and psychiatric phenotypes. She has a Ph.D. in Statistical Genetics from the Leiden University Medical Center and did her postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Nanyun (Violet) Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science with a secondary appointment in Comp Med. Her research focuses on the generalizability of NLP models, with applications to creative language generation, low-resource information extraction, and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. She won an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL and the Best Paper Award at AAAI Deep Learning on Graphs workshop. Her research has been supported by several DARPA, IARPA, and NIH grants, and industrial faculty awards. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing.
Currently, Jeff Chiang is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in Computational Medicine. On July 1, 2023, he will move to Neurosurgery with the title of Assistant Professor-In-Residence and will maintain a secondary appointment with Comp Med. Dr. Chiang is interested in translating recent advances in big data and artificial intelligence to active clinical research, and his work addresses the computational challenges which arise when doing so. He works closely with clinical departments to identify risk factors and develop predictive models for negative outcomes such as age-related macular degeneration. Chiang and his team develop techniques which overcome limited data availability, combine and leverage health information from disparate sources, and are as free from bias as possible. Dr. Chiang also leads the Computational Medicine Technology Core, which is involved in building the technical infrastructure for these computational models to be deployed in the clinic. Chiang has a Ph.D. in psychology (cognitive science) from UCLA.