Omar Ahmad

Director of Innovative Engineering, Department of Neurology

Director, Kata, Department of Neurology

Research Interests

Physics Driven Animation, Neuro-motor Rehabilitation Using Interactive Experiences, Virtual and Augmented Reality for Medicine

Omar Ahmad, Ph.D. is the Director of Innovative Engineering in the Department of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and also the Director and Chief Creative Engineer of the Kata design group in the Department of Neurology. He is responsible for Kata’s creative output and all Kata personnel. His strategic vision focuses on four fundamental aspects:

1. Fostering the best entertainment content possible through artistic/emotional mastery, scientific research, and creative technological innovation
2. Creating visceral user experiences based upon neuroscience and physics based animations for engendering movements beneficial for motor recovery and brain repair
3. Overall vision for all Kata products, bridging the gap between academia and commercial-quality engineering
4. Applying the creative output of Kata to medical therapeutics on the clinical floor and iterating through design with physicians and clinical staff

Dr. Ahmad is the inventor of a number of physics-based real-time technologies and algorithms to create visceral user experiences that engender specific movements for greater brain plasticity after brain injury. He is responsible for maintaining tangible product output for KATA, so that it exceeds, in quality and innovation, what would be expected from academic or commercial production in isolation.

He received his BS, MSE, and PhD degrees in Computer Science, from the Johns Hopkins University, GWC Whiting School of Engineering.

Narges Ahmidi

Assistant Research Scientist

Research Interests

Translational research, Clinical outcome prediction, Surgical performance assessment,Big data analytics

Narges received her PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, her BSc in Computer Engineering and MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Tehran Polytechnic University, Iran. Her work is broadly focused on providing new solutions for analyzing dense human motion time-series in surgical procedures as well as sparse events in medical interventions. Her passion is to develop essential infrastructures for better quality of care in hospitals across the world.

Hiroshi Ashikaga

Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Attending Physician Cardiac Arrhythmia Service, Johns Hopkins Hospital

Research Interests

Sudden Cardiac Death, Data-Driven Modeling, Complex Systems; Information Theory, Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Ashikaga is a physician scientist with a passion for fundamental research to discover mathematical beauty behind natural and social phenomena. Dr. Ashikaga’s research specializes in unconventional, multi-disciplinary approaches to studying the heart at the intersection of applied mathematics, statistical physics and computer science. His laboratory focuses on theory development that leads to designing medical technology of the next generation and value delivery to the society.

Dr. Ashikaga received an M.D. and a Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He completed his cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He received his scientific training at the University of California, San Diego, the National Institutes of Health, and the Santa Fe Institute.

Selected Awards and Honors

• 2018, Visiting Scholar, Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, CA
• 2014, Fellow, Heart Rhythm Society
• 2011, Finalist, Melvin Judkins Young Clinical Investigator Award, American Heart Association
• 2011, Winner, Young Investigator Award, Asia-Pacific Heart Rhythm Society
• 2010, Howard S. Silverman Award, for originality and creativity in medical research, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
• 2006, Elite Reviewer, Journal of the American College of Cardiology
• 2006, Finalist and Honorable mention, Young Investigator Award, Heart Rhythm Society
• 2006, Fellowship Award, Astellas Foundation , 2006
• 2002, Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Heart Association

Publications
http://www.hiroshiashikaga.org/publications

Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell

Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Joint Appointment, Biomedical Engineering

Research Interests

Ultrasound imaging, Photoacoustic imaging, Image quality improvements, Advanced beamforming methods, Light delivery systems, Medical robotics, Image-guided surgery,Technology development, Medical device design, Clinical translation

Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell leads a highly interdisciplinary research program that integrates optics, acoustics, robotics, electronics, and mechanics, as well as signal processing and medical device design, to engineer and deploy innovative biomedical imaging systems that simultaneously address unmet clinical needs and significantly improve the standard of patient care. As the director of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab, Dr. Bell develops theories, models, and simulations to investigate advanced beamforming techniques for improving ultrasonic and photoacoustic image quality. In parallel, she designs and builds novel light delivery systems for photoacoustic imaging and incorporates medical robots to improve operator maneuverability and enable standardized procedures for more personalized medicine. The technologies developed in her lab are then interfaced with patients to facilitate clinical translation. These technologies have applications in neurosurgical navigation, cardiovascular disease, women’s health, and cancer detection and treatment.

Dr. Bell obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University (2012) and a BS in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Biomedical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). In addition, she spent a year abroad as an academic visitor at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital in the United Kingdom (2009-2010). Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Bell was a postdoctoral fellow with the Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. She published over 40 scientific journal articles and conference papers, holds a patent for SLSC beamforming, and is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award. She was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 Innovators Under 35 in the year 2016.

Affiliations: Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR), Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation

Selected Awards and Honors:

2016, MIT Technology Review, Innovator Under 35 (TR35)

2015, Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics

2015, NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award

2013, Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship

2012, UNCF-Merck Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

2011, UNCF-Merck Graduate Research Dissertation Fellowship

2009, Whitaker International Fellowship

Emad Boctor

Director, Medical UltraSound Imaging and Intervention Collaboration (MUSiiC) Research Laboratory

Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science

Research Interests:

Thermal imaging; Elasticity; Ultrasound imaging; Image-guided therapy; Image-guided intervention

Emad M. Boctor, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins Medicine Division of Medical Imaging Physics within the Department of Radiology and Radiological Science. He holds a joint appointment in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science. Dr. Boctor earned a B.Sc. in biomedical engineering from Egypt’s Cairo University before earning master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.

After joining the Hopkins faculty, he launched the Medical UltraSound Imaging and Intervention Collaboration (MUSiiC) Research Laboratory, which develops innovative ultrasound technologies for medical applications. He is also affiliated with the JHU Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) Engineering Research Center, a National Science Foundation-designated center.

Dr. Boctor has authored and co-authored more than 25 journal articles, as well as the book, Enabling Technologies for Ultrasound Imaging in Computer-Assisted Intervention. He holds several patents, with more pending.

Secondary Appointment: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Affiliations: Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) Engineering Research Center; Encephalitis Center

Jeremy D. Brown

John C. Malone Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research Interests

Haptic Feedback, Surgical robotics, Upper-limb Prosthetics, Rehabilitation Robotics

Jeremy’s research focuses on the interface between humans and robots with a specific focus on medical applications and haptic feedback. In particular, he seeks to develop novel haptic interfaces to upper-limb prosthetics, minimally-invasive surgical robotics, and rehabilitation robots. His research sits at the intersection of engineering, biomechatronics, medicine, and psychophysics and uses methods from human perception, motor control, neurophysiology, and biomechanics.

He is a graduate of the Atlanta University Center’s Dual Degree Engineering Program, earning B.S. degrees in Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering from Morehouse College and the University of Michigan, respectively. He also attained his M.S. and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is part of the Haptics Research Group in Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) laboratory. His appointment at Hopkins will begin January 2017.
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Brian Caffo

Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health

Research Interests

Neuroimaging, statistical methodology, data science, open education

Brian Caffo, PhD received his doctorate in statistics from the University of Florida in 2001 before joining the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics, where he became a full professor in 2013. He has pursued research in statistical computing, generalized linear mixed models, neuroimaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, image processing and the analysis of big data. He created and led a team that won the ADHD-200 prediction competition and placed twelfth in the large Heritage Health prediction competition. He was the recipient the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers, the highest award given by the US government for early career researchers in STEM fields. He co-created and co-directs the SMART (www.smart-stats.org) group focusing on statistical methodology for biological signals. He also co-created and co-directs the Data Science Specialization, a popular MOOC mini degree on data analysis and computing having over three million enrollments. Dr. Caffo is the director of the graduate programs in Biostatistics and is the recipient of the Golden Apple teaching award and AMTRA mentoring awards.

Christopher G. Chute

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Of Health Informatics

Professor Of Medicine

Chief Health Research Information Officer, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Research Interests

Clinical Data Representation, Ontology

Dr. Chute is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Research Information Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. He received his undergraduate and medical training at Brown University, internal medicine residency at Dartmouth, and doctoral training in Epidemiology at Harvard. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American College of Medical Informatics. His career has focused on how we can represent clinical information to support analyses and inferencing, including comparative effectiveness analyses, decision support, best evidence discovery, and translational research. He has had a deep interest in semantic consistency, harmonized information models, and ontology. He became founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo in 1988, retiring from Mayo in 2014, where he remains an emeritus Professor of Biomedical Informatics. He has been PI on a large portfolio of research including the HHS/Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) SHARP (Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects) on Secondary EHR Data Use, the ONC Beacon Community (Co-PI), the LexGrid projects, Mayo’s CTSA Informatics, and several NIH grants including one of the eMERGE centers from NGHRI, which focus upon genome wide association studies against shared phenotypes derived from electronic medical records. He has been active on many HIT standards efforts and currently chairs the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-11 Revision.

Anton Dahbura

Executive Director, Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (JHUISI)

Associate Research Scientist Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Information Security, Distributed Systems, Fault-Tolerant Computing, Scheduling Optimization

Anton (Tony) Dahbura received the BSEE, MSEE, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University in 1981, 1982, and 1984, respectively.

From 1983 until 1996 he was a researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, was an Invited Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, and served as Research Director of the Motorola Cambridge Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since 1996 he has led several entrepreneurial efforts in the areas of printing professional baseball operations and commercial real estate.

In January, 2012 he was named Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute in Baltimore.

From 2000-2002 he served as Chair of the Johns Hopkins University Engineering Alumni and in 2004 was the recipient of the Johns Hopkins Heritage Award for his service to the University. He chaired The Johns Hopkins Computer Science Department Advisory Board from 1998 until 2012 and also served on the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering National Advisory Council during that time.

Mark Dredze

John C. Malone Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Social Media, Health Informatics

Mark Dredze is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with affiliations in the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Applied Physics Lab, the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, the Center for Language and Speech Processing, and the Center for Population Health Information Technology. He holds an appointment in Health Science Informatics in the School of Medicine.

His research in natural language processing and machine learning has focused on graphical models, semi-supervised learning, information extraction, large-scale learning, and speech processing. His recent work includes health information applications, including information extraction from social media, biomedical, and clinical texts.

He earned his BS (’03) from Northwestern University; his MS (’04) from Yeshiva University; and his PhD (’09) from the University of Pennsylvania.

Secondary Appointments:
Research Scientist, Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Health Sciences Informatics, School of Medicine

Ayse P. Gurses

Associate Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine

Director, Center for Health Care Human Factors, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality

Research Interests

Human Factors Engineering, Cognitive Engineering, User-centered Design, Patient Safety, Sociotechnical Systems Approach to Technology Design and Implementation, Care Coordination

Ayse P. Gurses, PhD, MS, MPH is an associate professor in the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is the founding Director of the Center for Health Care Human Factors in the Johns Hopkins Medicine. She has joint appointments in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. Ayse is passionate about three critical and related public health topics: patient safety, health IT design and implementation, and occupational health and safety of healthcare workers. Formally trained in industrial and systems engineering and public health, she uses a combination of engineering and public health methodologies in her work. Ayse has been a principal or co-principal investigator on several federally funded research grants and contracts, totaling over $7M. Her current research efforts focus on improving patient-centered care and medication safety among elderly, health information technology design and implementation, improving coordination and teamwork in pediatric trauma, patient safety in the cardiac operating room, improving safety of transitions of care, increasing compliance with evidence-based guidelines to reduce infections, and clinician working conditions.

Ayse is the author of 50 peer-reviewed articles and 10 book chapters, and gave over 65 invited talks. She serves as the Scientific Editor of Applied Ergonomics, a top-level journal in the field of human factors engineering. She is also the Editor for the Sociotechnical Systems Analysis Department of the IIE Transactions in Healthcare Systems Engineering.

Ayse is the recipient of multiple awards including the Liberty Mutual Award for the Best Paper in the journal ‘Ergonomics,’ the International Ergonomics Association/ Liberty Mutual Best Paper Award in Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Forward under 40 award. Nominated by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Ayse is also a recipient of an Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS).

Gregory D. Hager

Director, Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare

Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Robotics, Medical Robotics, Human-Machine Systems

Gregory D. Hager is the Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Founding Director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. Professor Hager received his BA in Mathematics and Computer Science Summa Cum Laude at Luther College (1983), and his MS (1986) and PhD (1988) from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe, and was on the faculty of Yale University prior to joining Johns Hopkins. Professor Hager’s research interests include collaborative and vision-based robotics, time-series analysis of image data, and medical applications of image analysis and robotics. He is also the former Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, a board member of the Computing Research Association, and is a member of the governing board of the International Federation of Robotics Research. Professor Hager has served on the editorial boards of IEEE TRO, IEEE PAMI, and IJCV. He is a fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to Vision-Based Robotics and a Fellow of the MICCAI Society for his contributions to imaging and his work on the analysis of surgical technical skill.

Secondary Appointments: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Chien-Ming Huang

John C. Malone Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics

Chien-Ming Huang’ research focuses on building intuitive, interactive technologies to provide social, physical, and behavioral support for people. He is particularly passionate about using novel technologies to help special needs populations such as children with autism spectrum disorders. Dr. Huang completed his postdoctoral research at Yale University in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015, his M.S. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010, and his B.S. in Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 2006.

John Krakauer

Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement (BLAM) Lab

Co-Founder, Kata Project
John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, & Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Dr. John Krakauer is a neurologist and neuroscientist with an interest in the healthy and damaged motor system. He was an Associate Professor of Neurology and Co-Director of the Motor Performance Laboratory at Columbia University up until 2010. He is now the Director of the Center for Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins University where he studies motor learning and control in patients after stroke and their relationship to functional recovery. There is a critical need to establish whether motor learning itself is affected after stroke and to determine which forms of motor learning should be the focus of rehabilitation strategies. He has made a number of observations/contributions to the study of motor learning in healthy subjects and motor recovery after stroke that suggest new directions for the treatment of impairment early after stroke.

Harold P. Lehmann

Director and Professor, Division of Health Sciences Informatics  

Research Interests

Biostatistics; Evidence-based medicine; Decision making; Informatics; Bayesian

Dr. Harold Lehmann is a professor of health sciences informatics and of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He holds joint appointments in health policy and management and in international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His areas of clinical expertise include adolescent medicine and general pediatrics. Dr. Lehmann serves as the director of research and training for the Division of Health Sciences Informatics.

He received his B.A. from Columbia College. He earned his M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Dr. Lehmann’s research interests include medical informatics, evidence-based medicine and decision making, biostatics, decision analysis and Bayesian communications.

Dr. Lehmann is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is a member of the Society for Medical Decision Making and the American Medical Informatics Association.

Scott Levin

Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine

Assistant Director For Research, Department of Emergency Medicine

Joint Appointment Civil Engineering
Consultant, Operations Integration, Johns Hopkins Health System

Research Interests

Systems Engineering in Healthcare, Optimization of Hospital Resources and Patient Outcomes

Dr. Levin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and holds joint appointments in the Department Civil Engineering (Whiting School of Engineering). He also works as a member of the Department of Operations Integration to forward operational, quality, and financial improvement initiatives within the Johns Hopkins Health System. He is Director and Leadership Council Chair of the Systems Institute. Upon finishing his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Levin joined the Hopkins faculty in 2008. Dr. Levin’s research focuses on the use and development of systems engineering tools to study and improve the effectiveness, safety and efficiency of health care delivery. Research is directed toward determining how scarce health care resources may be managed and deployed to best care for patient populations. This includes an emphasis on systems engineering techniques aimed at improving quality of care, access to care, and medical decision-making.

Anand Malpani

Assistant Research Scientist

Research Interests

Surgical Education, Surgical Data Science, Simulation Training – Virtual Reality, Crowdsourcing, Human Motor and Cognitive Learning

Anand Malpani was born in 1989 in Mumbai, India. He received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2010. He undertook a summer research project in medical imaging at the Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes under the guidance of Vincent Ricordel in 2009. He joined the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University in 2010. His dissertation under the guidance of Gregory D. Hager, focused on surgical education and simulation-based training with the goal of automated surgical coaching. During this work, he developed tools that combine crowdsourcing and machine learning to deliver coaching interventions in collaboration with multiple surgical faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was awarded the Intuitive Surgical Student Fellowship in 2013, and the Link Foundation’s Modeling, Training and Simulation Fellowship in 2015. He was a summer research intern in the Simulation team at Intuitive Surgical Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) in 2015.

He started as an Assistant Research Scientist at the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare in March 2017. His focus is to develop technologies that assist surgical trainees in their skill learning processes. He is working towards the realization of a fully automated virtual coach to make trainees proficient in fundamental surgical skills, and to do so outside of the operating room in a virtual reality simulation-based training environment.

Seth Martin

Co-Director, Advanced Lipid Disorders Center

Assistant Professor of Medicine

Research Interests:

Cardiovascular Risk Assessment; Dyslipidemia; Mobile Health Technology; Primary and secondary prevention of coronary heart disease; Individuals with a family history of heart disease; Improved strategies for management of cardiovascular risk factors; Preventive Cardiology

Dr. Seth S. Martin received his Bachelor of Science degree from Washington and Lee University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to receive his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and completed his internal medicine training at Duke University.

Dr. Martin then completed a cardiology fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was designated the Henry R. Kravis & Marie-Josée Cardiovascular Fellow and also served as a Pollin Cardiovascular Prevention Fellow. Dr. Martin was awarded the Howard S. Silverman Research Award for originality and creativity in medical research. Additionally, he was recognized as an Up and Coming Future Star of Cardiology by the American College of Cardiology. During his fellowship, Dr. Martin obtained a Master of Health Science degree at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

After completing the fellowship, Dr. Martin joined the Johns Hopkins Cardiology faculty. He is a core faculty member with the Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease and co-directs the Advanced Lipid Disorders Center. Dr. Martin also serves as an Associate Faculty member in the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. He has a longstanding interest in preventive cardiology, in particular cardiovascular risk assessment, lipidology, and mobile health technology.

Dr. Martin cares for patients with both acute and chronic illnesses and serves on the Hopkins Bedside Medicine Faculty. He is a Firm Faculty Clinical Coach and Educator with the Janeway Firm of the Osler Medical Residency. He also participates in teaching medical students and public health students.

Dr. Martin has published more than 150 articles in leading cardiology and medicine journals, as well as 12 book chapters. He contributed to an update to preventive cardiology published in Braunwald’s Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine. He serves as Associate Editor for the American College of Cardiology’s CardioSource Dyslipidemia Clinical Community and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Clinical Lipidology.

Simon Mathews

Assistant Director, Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins Bayview

Head of Clinical Innovation at Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality 

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Research Interests:

Applying quality and safety focus to the development of technology solutions; current projects involve: examining quality and safety clinical outcomes; using technology to augment care coordination and communication; applying machine learning to aid in improved diagnosis; development of mobile/digital solutions to aid in clinical decision support; application of robotics in the clinical environment 

Dr. Mathews leads efforts in clinical innovation at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. He is focused on transforming hospitals and health systems into highly reliable organizations that excel in delivering high quality care. He works closely on strategic initiatives at AI including the development of learning healthcare systems, expansion of governance structures for quality and safety, and collaborations with strategic partners including Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and Ernst & Young. In addition, he works clinically in the Division of Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins where he is immersed in quality and safety efforts. He earned his medical degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins. Prior to his medical training he also worked briefly in investment banking at Goldman Sachs in New York City. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia where he studied Economics as a Jefferson Scholar.

Todd McNutt

Associate Professor Of Medical Physics And Director Of Clinical Informatics, Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences

Research Interests

Learning health systems in radiation oncology, Radiation dosimetry and treatment planning, Image guidance and adaptive radiotherapy

Dr. McNutt PhD is an Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences. He has joint appointments in the Departments of Health Science Informatics and Computer Science in the Malone Center of Healthcare Engineering. Dr. McNutt’s primary research goal is to develop a learning health system in the context of radiation oncology for decision support and personalized radiotherapy.

Dr. McNutt has pioneered the development of a local level learning health system in radiation oncology with the Oncospace program for the last ten years. The system has been used to personalize radiation therapy by 1) predicting patient specific treatment plan quality (achievable radiation dose) and automating planning using the relationships between normal anatomy and tumor volumes based on the knowledgebase of prior patients; 2) predicting patients at risk of developing high grade treatment toxicities (e.g. xerostomia or dysphagia) or significant weight loss to guide care management; 3) predicting disease outcomes to guide intent and aggressiveness of treatment.

A primary component is creating a medical environment that allows us to measure how well we perform clinically for our patients. This requires incorporating medical IT infrastructure into the clinical setting and using it to measure the patient experience through clinician assessments, patient reported quality of life instruments and direct measures of patient condition and quantify it for analysis, trending and feedback. This has involved establishing workflows and human computer interfaces that enable the clinician to interact with the patients with minimal distraction while capturing the data. The effort has resulted in perpetual prospectively collected knowledgebases for head and neck, prostate, pancreas, and thoracic cancers that allow efficient analysis of clinical data to look at toxicity and outcome trends and how they correlate with the full 3D delivered radiation dosimetry within normal anatomy and targeted tumors.

Dr. McNutt also maintains research efforts in tradition medical physics applications to radiotherapy. He has worked to accelerate the treatment planning process developing a GPU based convolution/superposition dose computation algorithm for external beam radiation therapy that has been included in commercial systems for small animal radiation therapy planning as well as in quality assurance for treatment delivery in clinical systems.

Prior to his experience at Johns Hopkins, Dr. McNutt was the Director of Research and Advance Development for the Philips Radiation Oncology Systems developing the Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system. His work included intensity modulated radiotherapy planning and optimization, model based image segmentation and adaptive radiotherapy. This industrial work was done in a commercial software development environment following the FDA quality system regulations for medical device manufacturing and taught him best practices in software development and design to meet customer and user interface requirements.

Dr. McNutt maintains a strong interest in teaching post-doctoral fellows and students. Throughout his career he has mentored several post-docs and students in Medical Physics and Healthcare Informatics. He is also active teaching clinical residents in radiation oncology as well as students through lectures in Computer Science and Health Informatics.

Casey Overby Taylor

Assistant Professor Divisions of, General Internal Medicine and Health Sciences Informatics in the Department of Medicine

Research Interests

translational bioinformatics, human-centered technology design research, clinical decision support, knowledge-based methods

Dr. Casey Overby Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Divisions of General Internal Medicine and Health Sciences Informatics in the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. She completed pre-doctoral National Library of Medicine biomedical informatics training and National Human Genome Research Institute genome sciences training fellowships at the University of Washington. She also completed a post-doctoral National Library of Medicine informatics training fellowship at Columbia University. As an informatics researcher, Dr. Taylor’s interests intersect at public health genomics and biomedical informatics. She is currently developing applications that support translation of genomic research to clinical and population-based healthcare settings and delivering health information and knowledge to the public. Dr. Taylor is also developing knowledge-based approaches to use Big Data such as electronic health record data for population health.

Suchi Saria

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Machine learning, Computational health informatics, Probabilistic Methods, Time Series Models, Predictive modeling in healthcare.
Information extraction in domains with structured and unstructured data (e.g., text, sensing devices, electronic health records, smart rooms)

Saria’s interests span machine learning, computational statistics, and its applications to domains where one has to draw inferences from observing a complex, real-world system evolve over time. The emphasis of her research is on Bayesian and probabilistic graphical modeling approaches for addressing challenges associated with modeling and prediction in real-world temporal systems. In the last seven years, she has been particularly drawn to computational solutions for problems in health informatics (see her recent article on this topic) as she sees a tremendous opportunity there for high impact work.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, she earned her PhD and Masters at Stanford in Computer Science working with Dr. Daphne Koller. She also spent a year at Harvard University collaborating with Dr. Ken Mandl and Dr. Zak Kohane as an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow. While in the valley, she also spent time as an early employee at Aster Data Systems, a big data startup acquired by Teradata. She enjoys consulting and advising data-related startups. She is an investor and an informal advisor to Patient Ping.

She is originally from Darjeeling, India and (jokingly) adds that she can be bribed with good tea.

Example press articles on her work can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here. See her homepage for more details.

Secondary Appointments: Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Institute for Computational Medicine, Center of Population Health Information Technology, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality.

Ilya Shpitser

John C. Malone Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Causal inference and missing data, Graphical models, Longitudinal data analysis in medicine and epidemiology

Ilya Shpitser received his PhD from UCLA in 2008, under the supervision of Judea Pearl. From 2008 to to 2012 he was a Research Associate in the causal inference group at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Statistics at the University of Southampton. His research includes all areas of causal inference and missing data, particularly using graphical models. Much of the recent applications of his work involved teasing out causation from association in observational medical data.

Sauleh Siddiqui

Assistant Professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Applied Mathematics & Statistics

Research Interests

Multilevel and Multiobjective Optimization to Improve Patient Flow and Staffing, Simulation of Perioperative Care, Predicting Heart Failure Readmission after Discharge, Analysis of the Clinical Trials System, Predicting Early Discharge from Medical Units, Global vaccine development

Sauleh Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering with an appointment in Applied Mathematics & Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Research Fellow at the and the German Economic Research Institute (DIW Berlin) and Visiting Lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Optimization and Engineering and is currently serving as Chair for the Energy Cluster and Vice Chair for Linear and Conic Optimization for The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. His research is on formulating and solving optimization and game theory models applicable to large-scale systems. Such systems arise when modeling problems in energy and environmental markets, public health, and healthcare. He also models engineering design and develops novel algorithms along with supporting mathematical theory.

He has received research funding from the World Bank, Johns Hopkins Health System, the Environment Energy Sustainability Health Institute, and the Norwegian Research Council. In addition, he has collaborated on projects with the International Council on Clean Transportation, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Engineering, and Bikemore. These projects have included modeling energy and climate markets, patient flow and staffing in hospitals, global vaccination strategies, and urban transport networks.

He received an A.B. in Mathematics and Public Policy from Franklin & Marshall College and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen

Professor Of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Radiology And Neurosurgery Associate Faculty, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality

Director, Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation

Research Interests

Medical imaging, Computed tomography (CT) and cone-beam CT, Multi-modality image registration, Image analysis, Image-guided interventions, Image-guided surgery, Patient safety

Dr. Siewerdsen leads a program for translational research in medical imaging and image-guided interventions at Johns Hopkins University. Primary research interests include the development of new imaging technologies, 3D imaging methods, and image registration, with a focus on CT and cone-beam CT combined with other modalities for improved diagnostic accuracy and high-precision intervention. Collaborations and areas of major clinical interest include Neurosurgery, Orthopaedic Surgery, Otolaryngology, Radiation Oncology, Interventional Radiology, and Diagnostic Radiology. His work includes early development of flat-panel x-ray detectors and pioneering work in cone-beam CT, including intraoperative C-arms, dedicated cone-beam CT systems for radiology, and the first cone-beam CT system for image-guided radiation therapy, now standard of care. He worked previously at William Beaumont Hospital Research Institute (Royal Oak MI) and the Ontario Cancer Institute / University of Toronto (Toronto ON) after receiving his PhD in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1998.

Shameema Sikder

Director, Center for Excellence for Ophthalmic Surgical Education and Training

Assistant Professor Of Ophthalmology, The Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute

Research Interests

Surgical Education, Cornea and Cataract Surgery

Shameema Sikder, M.D., founding medical director of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Bethesda, is an assistant professor of ophthalmology. She specializes in corneal disorders, including Fuchs dystrophy and keratoconus, complex cataracts, and external eye diseases. Dr. Sikder’s clinical interests include surgical treatments for corneal diseases, such as endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK, DSAEK), complex cataracts, and treatments for keratoconus.

Dr. Sikder is the director of the Center of Excellence for Ophthalmic Surgical Education and Training (OphSET) at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She has a particular interest in surgical education and is working on technologies that could be implemented at the international level to improve the level of ophthalmic surgical care.

Dr. Sikder received her M.D. degree from the University of Arizona. She completed her ophthalmology residency at the Wilmer Eye Institute and fellowship in cornea and refractive disease at the Moran Eye Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she received the Claes Dohlman Fellow of the Year Award, recognizing the most distinguished cornea fellow in the nation. Dr. Sikder returned to Wilmer in 2011 and served as assistant chief of service (chief resident) and associate director of ocular trauma.

Honors

• University of Arizona, College of Medicine Excellence in Research Award
• University of Arizona, College of Medicine Research Distinction Award
• Claes Dohlman, M.D. Cornea Fellow of the Year Award (National)
• Mitchell Research Prize, Wilmer Resident Association
• Honor Society Member, Alpha Omega Alpha
• Intern of the Year, Tucson Hospitals Medical Education Program

Russell H. Taylor

John C. Malone Professor, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

Computer-Integrated Interventional Medicine, Medical Robotics, Medical Imaging and Modeling

Russell H. Taylor received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1976. He joined IBM Research in 1976, where he developed the AML robot language and managed the Automation Technology Department and (later) the Computer-Assisted Surgery Group before moving in 1995 to Johns Hopkins, where he is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science with joint appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Radiology, and Surgery and is also Director of the Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) and of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR). He is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, a Member of the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the IEEE, of the AIMBE, of the MICCAI Society, and of the Engineering School of the University of Tokyo. He is also a recipient of numerous awards, including the Maurice Müller Award for Excellence in Computer-Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery the IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award, the MICCAI Society Enduring Impact Award, the IEEE EMBS Technical Field Award, and the Honda Prize.

Secondary Appointments: Mechanical Engineering, Radiology, Surgery

Swaroop Vedula

Assistant Research Professor

I’m a medical doctor with surgical training and an epidemiologist. My research interests overlap several disciplines including clinical trials, different areas of surgery, epidemiology, biostatistics, and machine learning. I work on research related to measuring surgical skill and competency, technology for acquisition of motor and cognitive skill by surgeons, methods for fair comparisons of surgical interventions to estimate treatment effectiveness, analytics for surgical processes, and robotic assistance for skill acquisition and surgical coaching.

Archana Venkataraman

John C. Malone Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests

Functional Neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), Machine Learning & Probabilistic Inference, Network Modeling of the Brain, Integration of Imaging, Genetics and Behavioral Data

Archana Venkataraman’s research lies at the intersection of multimodal integration, network modeling and clinical neuroscience. Her main objective is to combine analytical tools, such as probabilistic inference and network theory, with neuroscientific findings in order to characterize complex processes within the brain. Her methodology has yielded novel insights into autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy, with the long-term goal of informing patient treatment and care. Archana received her Bachelors, Masters and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 2006, 2007 and 2012 respectively. She was a postdoctoral associate at both MIT and Yale prior to arriving at Johns Hopkins. Archana is affiliated with the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at JHU, which aims to improve the quality and efficacy of clinical interventions.

Awards

• 2016: Council of Early Career Investigators in Imaging (CECI²) Award
• 2013: CHDI Grant on Network Models for HD
• 2012: MIT Lincoln Labs Campus Collaboration Award
• 2011: NIH Advanced Multimodal Neuroimaging Training Program
• 2007: National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG)
• 2007: Siebel Scholarship
• 2006: MIT Provost Presidential Fellowship

Jing Xu

Assistant Research Scientist

Research Interests

Human motor skill learning and motor control, Brain repair and rehabilitation

Jing Xu received her PhD (2011) in Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Her PhD work was done in the laboratories of Cognition and Action, directed by Prof. Richard B. Ivry, and Computational Cognitive Science, directed by Prof. Thomas Griffiths. Her research was focused on human learning and control of movement, and human categorization.

She joined Johns Hopkins University in 2011, and worked with Dr. John W. Krakauer as a post-doctoral fellow. She was the lead post-doc of a longitudinal, multi-center project aimed at uncovering the biomarkers of stroke patients’ motor recovery, using multiple advanced neuroscience and clinical assessment methods. Her research has established that the human hand strength and dexterity recovery after stroke are mediated by separate biological systems.

Xu joined the Malone Center as an Assistant Research Scientist in 2017. Her primary research interest is to understand how people learn a motor skill. She uses research tools such as behavioral experiments, fMRI, TMS, and computation modeling questions to answer important questions about cognitive-motor representations, learning and control principles, recovery mechanisms after brain injuries, and strategies to enhance motor skills.