On December 8, 2025, the Malone Center hosted two poster sessions featuring the latest in healthcare engineering research as part of its 9th Annual Johns Hopkins Research Symposium on Engineering in Healthcare, “Human + AI: Redefining the Standard of Care in Medicine.”
Over 40 groups presented their work for symposium attendees to view, discuss, and vote on. All presenters received certificates of participation, while the top three posters in each session were awarded prizes. Learn more about the winners below.
Morning Session
Donald Kramer
The poster “DONNIE: Deep Omics Neural Network Inferred Expression”—presented by Donald Kramer, a PhD student of chemical and biomedical engineering and a member of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nanobiotechnology (INBT)—was one of the top three posters in the morning session as voted by symposium participants.
Along with his co-authors—Fan Wu, also a PhD student in ChemBE and INBT member; Joel Sunshine, an assistant professor of dermatology, pathology, oncology, and biomedical engineering; and Pei-Hsun Wu and Denis Wirtz, both faculty in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and INBT—as well as mentors Qingfeng Zhu and Robert Anders, both members of the Convergence Institute at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and faculty in the School of Medicine, Kramer showcased a powerful new deep learning tool that can be used to gain deeper molecular insights from standard images of hematoxylin and eosin stained slides, which have been used by pathologists to diagnose and understand disease for over 100 years. This work has the potential to allow researchers and doctors to rapidly and affordably extract detailed molecular information from existing standard pathology slides—promising to speed up research, help better classify diseases, and ultimately enhance personalized medicine by providing fast, data-driven molecular maps right where the diagnosis happens.
Iris Zheng
Also recognized was “De Novo Design of Alpha-Synuclein Fibrils Inhibitors for Treating Parkinson’s Disease,” presented by Iris Zheng, an undergraduate student of biomedical engineering.
Joined by Zachary Sayyah, an undergraduate double majoring in biomedical engineering and computer science; Yiwen “Melody” Jin, an undergraduate student of chemical and biomolecular engineering; and chemical and biomolecular engineering Professor Jeffrey Gray, Zheng presented a new protein design pipeline to generate stronger inhibitors that target the steric zipper interface of alpha-synuclein fibrils to help treat Parkinson’s disease and other progressive neurodegenerative disorders. Their study establishes a scalable computational strategy for designing peptide-based inhibitors with high affinity and specificity.
The final award in the morning session went to Kendall Reid and Madeline Brooks for their poster, “Do Machine Learning and Traditional Regression Models Identify the Same Influential Risk Factors? A Case Study of Virologic Failure in People with HIV.”
Reid, a master’s student in bioinformatics and a research staff member at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Brooks, a PhD student of epidemiology, conducted this work with Yao Zhao, a PhD student of applied mathematics and statistics; Chunyan Zheng and Elizabeth Humes, both biostatisticians in the Department of Epidemiology; Malone Center affiliate Yanxun Xu, an associate professor of applied mathematics and statistics; and epidemiology Professor Keri Althoff. The team sought to determine if machine learning approaches differ from traditional regression models in their ranking of risk factors for time to HIV virologic failure in the first decade after antiretroviral therapy initiation using different feature selection approaches.
Madeline Brooks, Keri Althoff, and Kendall Reid.
Afternoon Session
Amama Mahmood
In the afternoon, Malone Postdoctoral Fellow Amama Mahmood won recognition for her poster, “Reimagining Behavioral Sleep Medicine: Designing Conversational Sleep Diary and Visualization Tool.”
With her co-authors—Bokyung Kim, a master’s student of engineering management; Honghao Zhao, a master’s student of computer science; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty Molly E. Atwood, Luis F. Buenaver, and Michael T. Smith; and Chien-Ming Huang, a John C. Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science—Mahmood designed a voice-based conversational agent as an alternative method of making sleep diary entries. The work introduces a large language model-powered conversational sleep diary and a specialist-facing visualization tool, and provides empirical insights into how conversational agents can support behavioral sleep interventions in new and transformative ways.
Haoyue Sun
Another prize went to Haoyue Sun, a senior research data analyst in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, for his poster, “KM-GPT: An Automated Pipeline for Reconstructing Individual Patient Data from Kaplan-Meier Plots.”
Joined by Yao Zhao, Yantian Ding, Engr ’25 (MSE), and Yanxun Xu, Sun developed the first fully automated, AI-powered pipeline for reconstructing individual patient data directly from Kaplan–Meier survival plots with high accuracy, robustness, and reproducibility to support more informed evidence-based decision-making in clinical research. Learn more about this work here.
Matthew Farah
Finally, biomedical engineering undergraduate student Matthew Farah was recognized for his work on “A Novel Quantitative Method to Evaluate Functional Impairment in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease and Other Movement Disorders.” He was joined by team members Arihant Singh, also an undergraduate student of biomedical engineering; Ramya Palani, Engr ’25 (BS); Jerry Jing, an undergraduate double majoring in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics; and Viggy Vanchinathan, Engr ’25 (BS), and was mentored by Neurology and Neurosurgery faculty Stephen Grill and Alexander Pantely; Michelle Zwernemann, an associate professor of the practice in Biomedical Engineering; and James Brasic, a former assistant professor of radiology and radiological science.
To address the pressing need for quantitative technology to aid in both the diagnosis and long-term management of movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, the team developed a novel, sensor-based system to collect data from patients while they brush their teeth and comb their hair, enabling objective assessment during naturalistic daily activities and providing a powerful tool to support diagnosis and long-term patient management.
See the full list of posters presented in both sessions here.
The Malone Center would like to thank all who presented at, attended, and organized this year’s poster sessions, and looks forward to hosting more trainee research at its next symposium, scheduled to take place on December 14, 2026.
Image Caption: Donald Kramer at the morning poster session of the 9th Annual Johns Hopkins Research Symposium on Engineering in Healthcare.