PhD Students

Ronald W. Buie received his MS in Biomedical and Health Informatics, and MPH in Health Services: Health Systems and Policy, both from the University of Washington. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics while working as an epidemiologist in Public Health Seattle & King County’s Assessment, Policy Development, and Evaluation Unit. His dissertation is a study of analytics teams in population health and health care settings, with an aim of describing the work, structures, and interdependencies of these teams. His professional work centers around the evaluation of health care and population health programs where he develops analytics systems in support of continuous improvement processes, systems integration, and informed decision making by grantors, program leadership, researchers, and communities.

Arjun Chakraborty received a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Northwestern University and a Masters in Bioinformatics and a Masters in Data Science from UC Berkeley. He has pursued research on generating donor-specific transplant tolerance after renal transplantation by coculturing donor B cells and recipient T cells. He has also pursued research on using graph databases to build a biomedical knowledge network which can enable more precise disease diagnoses and delineate novel mechanisms of disease. Arjun moved to Seattle to pursue a PhD in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. During his graduate studies, he hopes to apply novel NLP techniques to make tools which uses electronic health records to make advancements in translational bioinformatics.

Brian Chang, MD is a graduate of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and also received a MSc in biomedical informatics from NYU School of Medicine. During his clinical rotations, Brian saw opportunities in informatics to optimize delivering care and decided to pursue a PhD at University of Washington. His research interests are in translational artificial intelligence, where his dissertation work focuses on developing mult-modal models to detect osteoporotic compression fractures for opportunistic screening of osteoporosis.

Chak Charoensilpchai earned his degree in pharmacy and gained experience as a pharmacist at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Thailand. He received the Royal Thai Government Scholarship to study abroad and graduated with an MPH in Health Management and Policy from Oregon State University. Currently, Chak is pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington with a focus on the utilization of electronic health records in primary care, public health informatics, and consumer health informatics.

Yile Chen received her BS in Applied Biology from Zhejiang University and worked as a bioinformatician for three years in China analyzing high-throughput genomics data. She then pursued an MS in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. She is now a Ph.D. student in BIME at the University of Washington and a trainee in the IGVF consortium working on understanding genomic variation’s impact on genome function. Her general interest is in integrating molecular omics data with ML algorithms to gain a better understanding of clinical data.

Xiruo Ding received his BS in Environmental Science in Tongji University and M.S. in Biostatistics in Duke University. His experience includes predictive modeling and utilization of EHR. His current research is on deep learning and natural language processing, for both theoretical part and their application in biomedical domain. A recent focus is to address confounding and distribution shift, with the hope to make models robust and accurate.

Peter Ju received a BS in Molecular and Cellular Biology and a minor in Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then worked as a research technician for the Department of Radiology at Northwestern University. He assisted with lab operations and imaging analysis for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging projects. After working for two years, Peter moved to Seattle to pursue a PhD in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. During his graduate studies, he hopes to strengthen his computational skillset to conduct exciting research projects in translational bioinformatics.

Oliver Li received his BS in Biology from National Chiao Tung University in 2018. During his years in undergraduate, he started up a company called, Vernace Tech, focusing on precision agriculture using machine learning, an IOT system, and an eco-friendly pesticide. Currently, Oliver is pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington exploring how social media users react to misinformation with the aim to assist social media researchers to identify potentially harmful content in the early stage on the social media.

Namu Park is a PhD student in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. He earned his BS in Convergence Software from Sogang University and his MS in Data Science from Yonsei University in South Korea. With prior experience as a researcher at Asan Medical Center, he has applied various natural language processing (NLP) techniques to medical data, further cultivating his interest in Clinical NLP. His primary research goal is to develop automated methods to extract valuable information from clinical notes such as radiology reports to enhance patient care.

Ashmitha Rajendran completed an MS in Quantitative Biology from Northwestern University, and BS in biomolecular engineering and neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz. Since, she worked at the Knight Cancer Institute and a breast cancer risk prediction startup, Gabbi Inc. Ashmitha works with Seattle Children’s Research Institute on research projects which involve mapping pediatric brain cancer initiation during embryonic neurodevelopment with genomics.

Ojas Ramwala is a Biomedical and Health Informatics Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on developing parameter-efficient, multimodal, and interpretable Deep Learning algorithms for Biomedical Image and Signal Processing, Bioinformatics, EHR Analysis, Genetics, and other diverse healthcare applications. He received a B.Tech. in ECE from the National Institute of Technology Surat, India, in 2021. During his undergraduate, he has been fortunate to work as an AI Research Intern at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO-IIRS), and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-CSIO). Before beginning his Ph.D., he spent a year at New York University developing methods to optimize AI algorithms for Bioinformatics and Medical Image Processing applications. Currently, he is pursuing Breast Cancer research under the wonderful guidance of Dr. Christoph Lee and Dr. Sean Mooney.

Nick Reid is a PhD student, who previously earned a Master of Health Informatics at the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice from the University of California at Berkeley. Currently, Nick is evaluating a patient-centered decision support tool for cystic fibrosis advanced lung disease and the implementation of home spirometry in cystic fibrosis clinical research. Nick researches how information systems support people to manage chronic health conditions using design, engineering, mixed, and qualitative methods — they aim to improve health information accessibility.

Xinyang Ren received her BS in electrical and computer engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020. Currently, Xinyang is pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington with a focus on mental health informatics. Her research projects involved utilizing large language models to analyze text data for diagnosis of mental health disorders such as depression and suicide prevention.

Wesley completed his undergraduate studies in Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California, and continued on to do a Master’s in Neuroimaging and Informatics there. Now a graduate student in the BHI program, his current work mainly involves using MRI breast cancer screening images along with clinical factors for cancer risk modeling. He is interested in learning more about medical imaging informatics and statistical methods. On weekends, he enjoys practicing archery at the Husky Archery Club, and trying out new cooking recipes at home.

Amanda Tsai received her BS in Mathematics with a specialization in computing from UCLA and pursued an MS in Biostatistics at Columbia University where she worked as a graduate researcher at the Center for Statistical Genetics. She is now a Ph.D student in the BIME program at the University of Washington and is interested in working on projects involving translational bioinformatics.

Bhargav Vemuri received his BS in medical sciences and MPH in biostatistics from the University of Cincinnati. During that time, he completed several bioinformatics projects including his undergraduate senior capstone, “Integrative omics to discover candidate therapeutics for glioblastoma and systemic sclerosis”, and master’s thesis, “Identification of prognostic metabolic classifier in localized clear cell renal cell carcinoma”. Currently, Bhargav is a PhD student in biomedical and health informatics at UW and a member of the Hadlock Lab at the Institute for Systems Biology. He is interested in applying deep learning methods to longitudinal real-world data to identify multivariate trajectories of treatment response in chronic disease.

Serena Xie received a BS in Mathematics and Economics at the University of California, Davis, and her MS in Information System Management at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research projects converge at the intersection of health equity, informatics tools, and natural language processing. Her research centers around engaging patients and providers in the development of informatics tools. She is dedicated to devising scalable strategies for the cultural adaptation of digital health solutions. Through her work, Serena strives to enhance mental healthcare accessibility, leveraging the power of informatics and NLP in the process.

George received a BS degree in Bioengineering at University of California, San Diego. Now he pursues a Ph.D. degree in BIME at University of Washington, with a data science focus. His current research involves analyzing text coherence for the detection of neuropsychiatric conditions. He hopes that through informatics technologies, he can catch unique linguistic patterns from patients and help with early detection or treatment monitoring.

Siyang (Sunny) Zeng received a BA in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the University of California Berkeley and a MS in Health Informatics from the University of San Francisco, and is pursuing a PhD in the department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME). Her research focuses on utilizing electronic health records and informatics techniques to provide better understanding of disease progressions as well as clinical decision support. Her projects involve machine learning, data mining, and user studies.

Michael received his BS in chemical biology from Xiamen University in 2019 and MA in biomedical informatics from Columbia University in 2021. He is interested in informatics applications for patients and consumers, including those based on electronic health records. His recent research projects involved patient decision aids on breast cancer prevention, health information resources on chronic diseases, and automated risk calculation based on electronic health records.

Weipeng Zhou received a BA degree in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. He is interested in applying natural language processing techniques (BERT, large language models, etc.) to solving medical problems. His recent research projects include multi-modal prediction of ICU in-hospital mortality prediction using patient records and clinical notes, multi-modal prediction of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest using patient records and clinical notes, segmentation of clinical notes, and coding circumstances preceding female firearm suicides from suicide reports.