Computational Medicine welcomes three outstanding new faculty members
By Leticia Ortiz | Computational Medicine, UCLA
The Department of Computational Medicine is excited to welcome three outstanding new faculty members this year: Dr. Margaux Hujoel, Dr. Hosein Mohimani, and Dr. Yuzhe Yang. Each brings a unique perspective to our community, expanding our strengths in statistical genetics, small molecule discovery, and artificial intelligence for health.
Dr. Margaux Hujoel
Dr. Margaux Hujoel joins UCLA as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Human Genetics and Computational Medicine. She studied Mathematical and Computational Biology at Harvey Mudd College, earned her Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health under the mentorship of Alkes Price, and completed postdoctoral training in Statistical Genetics with Po-Ru Loh at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Margaux's research focuses on method development, using large-scale biobank datasets to better understand genetic influences on human diseases and complex traits. Recently, she has focused on characterizing short tandem repeat instability. Her work has already gained national recognition—she was named a 2024 STAT Wunderkinds.
Margaux is looking forward to working with graduate students and postdocs with strong quantitative backgrounds.
The Hujoel Lab
Dr. Hosein Mohimani
Dr. Hosein Mohimani joins UCLA as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine. He is interested in using tandem mass spectrometry and machine learning to characterize the products of enzymatic transformations of small molecules, with special focus on human P450 metabolism. Additionally, he is interested in integrating machine learning, automated liquid handling systems, and chromatography systems (e.g. flash chromatography and HPLC) to design fully automated systems for high-throughput purification of small molecules, with applications in metabolism, synthetic chemistry, and drug discovery.
Before UCLA, Hosein was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and held research roles at Illumina Inc. and UC San Diego. At CMU, Hosein's focus of research was on discovery of bioactive natural products. He completed his B.S. at Sharif University of Technology and his Ph.D. at UC San Diego.
His accomplishments have been recognized with the Sloan Research Fellowship and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2). Hosein is eager to collaborate with groups focused on discovery of bioactive small molecule and is welcoming new students to join his lab in both computational and experimental mass spectrometry.
Mohimani's Lab
Dr. Yuzhe Yang
Dr. Yuzhe Yang joins UCLA as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Computational Medicine and Computer Science after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT. He leads the Health Intelligence Lab (HAIL), where his team builds scalable, multisensory, and generative AI for health.
Yuzhe’s research spans AI biomarkers for diseases such as Parkinson’s, generalist health models trained on wearable and clinical data (e.g., the SensorLM project), and trustworthy AI approaches for safe and fair use in real-world settings.
His recent highlights include SensorLM work on language-aligned models for wearable sensors (Google Research blog); Science Advances paper and Nature Medicine paper on fairness and generalization of expert-level foundation models and language models; and earlier research on sleep-based and at-home biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease. He also received AMIA’s Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
He welcomes Ph.D. students, postdocs, and research interns to join HAIL, and is especially excited about cross-campus collaborations in clinical medicine, machine learning, and health data.
Join Their Labs and Collaborations
Each of our new faculty members is building dynamic, collaborative teams and has open positions for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Students interested in working with them are encouraged to reach out directly with a CV.
We are delighted to welcome Margaux, Hosein, and Yuzhe to the UCLA Computational Medicine community, and we look forward to the discoveries and collaborations ahead!