Officers
SIGBio Officers
Chair
May Dongmei Wang
Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory
University, USA
Biosketch: Dr. May Dongmei Wang is Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow and full professor in the Departments of Biomedical Eng. and Electrical and Computer Eng. at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Her research is in Biomedical Big Data and AI for predictive, personalized, and precision health (pHealth). She published 260+ peer-reviewed articles in referred journals and conference proceedings with more than 13K Google Scholar citations, and delivered 240+ invited and keynote lectures. Dr. Wang is the Director of Biomedical Big Data Initiative, a Georgia Distinguished Cancer Scholar, a Petit Institute Faculty Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, an AIMBE Fellow, an IAMBE Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a member of Board of Directors in American Board of AI in Medicine. She received BEng from Tsinghua University China, and MS&PhD degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of Georgia Tech Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award for Undergrad Research, and Emory University MilliPub Award (for a high-impact paper that is cited over 1,000 times). Dr. Wang’s research has been supported by NIH, NSF, CDC, Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Cancer Coalition, Shriners’ Hospitals for Children, Children’s Health Care of Atlanta, Enduring Heart Foundation, Coulter Foundation, Microsoft Research, HP, UCB, and Amazon.
Dr. Wang is currently the Senior Editor for IEEE Journal of Biomedical & Health Informatics (J-BHI), an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions for BME, and IEEE Reviews for BME, a regular panelist for NIH CDMA study section, NSF Smart and Connect Health, Brain Canada and multiple European countries. She co-organizes IEEE Healthcare Summit on Integrating BHI and AI to Combat Pandemics, and IEEE-JBHI Special Issue on AI-driven Informatics, Sensing, Imaging and Big Data Analytics for Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic. Over 19 years, she helped grow the large BHI community by co-organizing many conferences and summits in IEEE, ACM, and Gordon Research Conferences. In 2021, she is selected into Georgia Tech Provost’s Emerging Leader’s Program, and is elected into International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE) Executive Committee. She serves as ACM Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics (SIGBio) Chair and IEEE-EMBS BHI-TC Chair. During 2018-2020, she was Carol Ann and David Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. During 2017-2019, she was IEEE-EMBS Vice President, and Bioinformatics Nomination Committee Chair in American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). During 2015-2017, she was Georgia Tech Biomedical Informatics Program Co-Director in Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI). During 2014-2015, she was IEEE-EMBS Distinguished Lecturer, 2016 IEEE-EMBS Annual Conference Chair, and an Emerging Area Editor for Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. Before 2016, Dr. Wang was Director of Bioinformatics and Biocomputing Core in NIH/NCI-sponsored U54 Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, and Co-Director of Georgia-Tech Center of Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry for over 10 years.
Vice-chair
Ananth Kalyanaraman
Professor
Washington State University, USA
Biosketch: Ananth Kalyanaraman is a Professor
and Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Science at the School of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State
University in Pullman. He is the Director of the AgAID AI
Institute for transforming workforce and decision support in
agriculture. He serves as the Associate Director for the School
of EECS, and also holds a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (PNNL). He holds affiliate faculty positions
at the Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program and the Paul G.
Allen School for Global Health. Ananth received his bachelors
from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur,
India (B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, 1998); and
subsequently M.S. (Computer Science, 2002) and Ph.D. (Computer
Engineering, 2006) from Iowa State University. Ananth works at
the intersection of parallel computing, graph analytics, and
bioinformatics/computational biology. His focus is on developing
algorithms and software for scalable analysis of large-scale
data from various scientific domains and particularly
agriculture, plant and life sciences. Research in his lab has
been supported by various funding sources including the National
Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Center for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC). Ananth is a recipient of U.S.
Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, and his
student-led research works have received multiple conference
best paper awards and a prestigious graph challenge award.
Ananth serves/has served on the editorial boards of several
reputed journals (including TPDS, TCBB, JPDC, ParCo), and also
regularly serves in various capacities including organizational
capacities at various conferences in the areas of parallel
processing and bioinformatics. He is currently serving as a
Vice-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel
Programming (TCPP). Ananth is a senior member of IEEE, and a
member of ACM and SIAM.
Treasurer
Byung-Jun Yoon
Associate Professor
Texas A&M University, USA
Biosketch: Dr. Byung-Jun Yoon received the
B.S.E. (summa cum laude) degree from the Seoul National
University (SNU), Seoul, Korea, in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),
Pasadena, CA, in 2002 and 2007, respectively, all in Electrical
Engineering. In 2008, he joined the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX,
USA, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Yoon also
holds a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory
(BNL), Upton, NY, where he is a Scientist in Computational
Science Initiative (CSI). During October 2014-August 2016, Dr.
Yoon was on a leave of absence from Texas A&M and worked at the
Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar, as one of the
founding faculty members in the College of Science and
Engineering. His recent honors include the National Science
Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the Best Paper Award at the 9th
Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC), the Best Paper
Award at the 12th Annual MCBIOS Conference, and the SLATE
Teaching Excellence Award from the Texas A&M University System.
Dr. Yoon’s main research interests include bioinformatics,
computational network biology, machine learning, and signal
processing.
SIGBio Board of Directors
Christina Boucher
Associate Professor
University of Florida, USA
Biosketch: Christina Boucher is an Associate
Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science
and Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research is on
developing algorithms and data structures that allow for
large-scale biological sequence analysis. She incorporates the
latest sequencing technologies and biological analyses into her
work. Two major biological themes recur in her research:
alignment to pan-genomes (usually human) and understanding how
microbial species move and evolve. She is currently a standing
member of the NIH BDMA study section and a Board Member of ACM
SIGBIO.
Jake Y. Chen
Professor
University of Alabama, USA
Biosketch: Dr. Jake Y. Chen is the Chief Bioinformatics Officer of Informatics Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a tenured Professor of Genetics, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering, and current President of the Midsouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS). At UAB, he leads the AI.MED laboratory to advance multi-omics modeling and artificial intelligence application in medicine. He has over 25 years of R&D experience in biological data mining and systems biology with >180 peer-reviewed publications and >200 invited talks worldwide on bioinformatics methodologies and biomedical applications. In the past 15 years, he also co-founded several biotechnological startups in precision medicine and systems biology, providing services to the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
He is an distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and elected fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He also serves on the editorial boards of BMC Bioinformatics, Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. He frequently serves on the National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation panels on cancer systems biology, bioengineering, bioinformatics, biological data science, and AI in life sciences. He has been an organizer of the International Bioinformatics and Knowledge Discovery (BIOKDD) for the past two decades. He was recognized as one of the “17 Informatics Experts Worth Listening To” by HealthTechTopia (2011), as a finalist as the “Indiana’s Technology Educator of the Year” award (2012-14), and as one of the “Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Healthcare” by Deep Knowledge Analytics (2019).
Peter L. Elkin
Professor
SUNY at Buffalo, USA
Biosketch: Dr. Elkin serves as Professor and
Chair of the UB Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is also
a Professor of Medicine at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Peter
L. Elkin has served as a tenured Professor of Medicine at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In this capacity he was the
Center Director of Biomedical Informatics, Vice-Chairman of the
Department of Internal Medicine and the Vice-President of Mount
Sinai hospital for Biomedical and Translational Informatics. Dr.
Elkin has published over 120 peer reviewed publications. He
received his Bachelors of Science from Union College and his
M.D. from New York Medical College. He did his Internal Medicine
residency at the Lahey Clinic and his NIH/NLM sponsored
fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and
the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Elkin has been working
in Biomedical Informatics since 1981 and has been actively
researching health data representation since 1987. He is the
primary author of the American National Standards Institute’s
(ANSI) national standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled
Health Vocabularies ASTM E2087, which has also been approved by
ISO TC 215 as a Technical Specification (TS17117). He has
chaired Health and Human Service’s HITSP Technical Committee on
Population Health. Dr. Elkin served as the co-chair of the AHIC
Transition Planning Group. Dr. Elkin is a Master of the American
College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American College of
Medical Informatics. Dr. Elkin chairs the International Medical
Informatics Associations Working Group on Human Factors
Engineering for Health Informatics. Dr. Elkin is the Editor of
the Springer Informatics Textbook, Terminology and
Terminological Systems. He was awarded the Mayo Department of
Medicine’s Laureate Award for 2005. Dr. Elkin is the index
recipient of the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding
contribution to the field of Medical Informatics.
Nurit Haspel
Associate Professor
University of Massachusetts, USA
Biosketch: Dr. Haspel is an associate
professor and undergraduate program director in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Before that, she was a postdoctoral research associate with the
Physical and Biological Computing Group at Rice University. She
graduated from the Department of Computer Science in Tel Aviv
University, Israel, where she was a member of the structural
bioinformatics group. Dr. Haspel’s research lies in the areas of
computational structural biology and structural bioinformatics.
Her goal is to better understand the structure and flexibility
of proteins, to model conformational changes in proteins, and to
design novel nano-structures which may contribute to the
understanding of the self-assembly properties of proteins and
facilitate experimental nano-design. In her research, Dr. Haspel
focuses on both the development of novel algorithms and the
application of state-of-the-art existing methodologies to
various problems in molecular biology, nanobiology and
biochemistry.
Sun Kim
Professor
Seoul National University, South Korea
Biosketch: Sun Kim is a Professor in the
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of the
Bioinformatics Institute, and an affiliated faculty for the
Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics at Seoul National
University. Before joining SNU, he was Chair of Faculty Division
C; Director of Center for Bioinformatics Research, an Associate
Professor in School of Informatics and Computing; and an Adjunct
Associate Professor of Cellular and Integrative Physiology,
Medical Sciences Program at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington.
Prior to joining IU in 2001, he worked at DuPont Central
Research from 1998 to 2001, and at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign from 1997 to 1998. Sun Kim received B.S and M.S
and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Seoul National University,
KAIST, and the University of Iowa, respectively.
Yi Pan
Professor
Georgia State University, USA
Biosketch: Dr. Yi Pan was born in Jiangsu,
China. He entered Tsinghua University in March 1978 with the
highest college entrance examination score among all 1977 high
school graduates in Jiangsu Province. Dr. Pan is a Distinguished
University Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer
Science and Professor of the Department of Computer Information
Systems at Georgia State University. Dr. Pan received his B.Eng.
and M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua
University, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and his Ph.D.
degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh,
USA, in 1991. Dr. Pan’s research interests include parallel and
cloud computing, wireless networks, and bioinformatics. Dr. Pan
has published more than 330 papers including over 150 SCI
journal papers and 50 IEEE Transactions papers. In addition, he
has edited/authored 39 books. He has received many awards from
organizations such as IEEE, NSF, AFOSR, JSPS, IBM, ISIBM, IISF
and Mellon Foundation. Dr. Pan has served as an editor-in-chief
or editorial board member for 15 journals including 7 IEEE
Transactions and a guest editor for 12 special issues for 10
journals including 2 IEEE Transactions. He has organized
numerous international conferences and workshops and has
delivered over 40 keynote speeches at international conferences
around the world. Dr. Pan is a “Great Master Face-to-Face”
Series Speaker (2012), an IEEE Distinguished Speaker
(2000-2002), a Yamacraw Distinguished Speaker (2002), a Shell
Oil Colloquium Speaker (2002), and a senior member of IEEE. He
is listed in Men of Achievement, Who’s Who in Midwest, Who’s Who
in America, Who’s Who in American Education, Who’s Who in
Computational Science and Engineering, and Who’s Who of Asian
Americans.
Past Officers
Chair
Srinivas Aluru
Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Klaus Advanced Computing Building
266 Ferst Drive
Atlanta, GA 30332
Vice-chair
Umit V. Catalyurek
Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Klaus Advanced Computing Building
266 Ferst Drive
Atlanta, GA 30332
Secretary-Treasurer
Preetam Ghosh
Associate Professor
Virginia Commonwealth University
401 West Main Street
P.O. Box 843019
Richmond, VA 23284
Newsletter Editors
Pierangelo Veltri
Associate Professor
University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
Viale Europa (Località Germaneto)
88100 CATANZARO, ITALY
Pietro Hiram Guzzi
Associate Professor
University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
Viale Europa (Località Germaneto)
88100 CATANZARO, ITALY
Director of Web Resources
Jaroslaw Zola
Associate Professor
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Buffalo, NY, 14260
Board of Directors
Mark Borodovsky
Regents Professor
Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science
Georgia Tech University
Atlanta, GA 30332
Mario Cannataro
Associate Professor
University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro
Viale Europa
1 College Circle
Catanzaro, 88100, Italy
Vasant Honavar
Pennsylvania State University
College of Information Sciences and Technology
301A Information Sciences and Technology Building
University Park, PA 16802
Tamer Kahveci
Associate Professor
University of Florida
CSE Building
Room E566
Gainesville, FL 32611
Wei Wang
Professor and Director
University of California, Los Angeles
Computer Science Department BH 3531G
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Cathy Wu
Edward G. Jefierson Chair
University of Delaware
Institute for Financial Services Analytics
15 Innovation Way, Suite 205
Newark, DE 19711