Biography: He has 37 years of experience in biotechnology. His early experience is in sequencing and analysis. He worked at DNASTAR in the early nineties and the Columbia Genome Center in the mid to late nineties. Since 2000 he has been a full-time Bioinformatics and computational biologist, starting at NIH-NIA Laboratory of Genetics under David Schlessinger,PhD. For over a decade, he has been managing the MS in Bioinformatics program at Tandon Online School of Engineering at NYU. In this capacity he advises, and he teaches programming for biologist, sequence analysis, and deep learning.

Biography: He is an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University (WSU), where he leads the Scalable Algorithms for Data Science (SCADS) Lab. Prior to joining WSU in Fall 2014, he was a research faculty at Purdue University, Department of Computer Science, where he served as a founding member and investigator in the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations Institute (CSCAPES), a multi-institution project funded by the Department of Energy under its SciDAC program. His current research interests include: graph algorithms and network science, high performance computing, bioinformatics and health informatics, and machine learning. In 2016, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for work on fast and scalable combinatorial algorithms for data analytics. Assefaw earned his PhD and MS in Computer Science from the University of Bergen, Norway and his BS in Electrical Engineering from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Biography: She is Professor of Computer Science at Arkansas State University, and the Inaugural Director of Center for No-Boundary Thinking (CNBT). Dr. Huang conceived the concept of No-Boundary Thinking (NBT). She founded the Arkansas Artificial Intelligence (AI) Campus, and founded the Joint Translational Research Lab on the campuses of Arkansas State University and St. Bernard’s Medical Center’s Internal Medicine Residency Program. Her research interests include Bioinformatics and Biomedical informatics; Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, deep learning; Graph theory and algorithms, Parameterized computation and complexity, Theory of computation. Dr. Huang was recently named as Arkansas Research Alliance Fellow, announced by Governor Asa Hutchinson. Her current research projects are supported by funding agents including NSF and NIH.

Biography: He serves as Interim Chair in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at UAPB. In this capacity, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in computer science, mathematics, and bioinformatics. In addition, he engages in bioinformatics research at UAPB, some of which is done in collaboration with other Arkansas institutions.
Dr. Walker has a persistent desire to investigate, learn, and share his knowledge with others. His bioinformatics research interests lie in protein structure prediction with emphasis on improving the accuracy of prediction. Dr. Walker’s lab develops models and tools for analyzing structural genomics and proteomics data. He has also collaborated on bioinformatics research projects with researchers at ASU, UALR, UAMS, UAF, NCTR, and others. He has published articles and delivered a number of presentations related to his research.
Dr. Walker earned both an MS and Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). He is a 2002 honors graduate of Morehouse College and a 1998 graduate of Pine Bluff High School. Dr. Walker has had many other educational and enriching experiences during his lifetime. These include student internship experiences at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Ames Research Center. He also worked in private industry in Little Rock, prior to pursuing advanced degrees at UALR and UAMS.
A few of Dr. Walker’s most notable honors and awards include SREB Doctoral Scholars Fellowship, Outstanding M.S. Graduate for UALR College of Engineering and Information Technology, Outstanding Bioinformatics Masters Student in the UALR/UAMS Bioinformatics Program, and first-place award for oral presentation at the 2014 MCBIOS Conference. Additionally, he has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Atlantic.
In his ever-vanishing spare time, he enjoys playing rugby, reading, and hanging out with his family—his wife Equilla and four children: Karl II, Victoria, Grace, and Zion.

Biography: She is the Project Director for Translational Bioinformatics the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Dr. Yuan had training in clinical medicine and pathology (M.D.), computer science (M.S.) and computational biology (Ph.D.). Before joining NIA, she was a Scientific Review Officer managing the review of grants applications in biomedical computing, health informatics, mobile health technology/smart device, and SBIR/STTR health informatics. Dr. Yuan has broad expertise in data science and pre-clinical and clinical drug development, has led efforts in the development of portfolio analysis tools when working at the Office of Director at NIH, and played the key role as Senior Investigator in leading the pharmacogenomics and precision medicine projects at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) R&D.

Biography: She is a full professor in the Departments of Biomedical Eng., and Electrical and Computer Eng. at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She is the Director of Biomedical Big Data Initiative, a Kavli Fellow, a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, a Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Faculty Fellow, a Petit Institute Faculty Fellow, an American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, and an International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE) Fellow. Her research is in developing Biomedical Big Data Analytics with AI in Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) for predictive, personalized, and precision health (pHealth). In FDA-organized MAQC international consortium, she led the comprehensive RNA-Seq analytics pipeline investigation which is published in Nature Scientific Reports. Dr. Wang published over 240 peer-reviewed articles in referred journals and conference proceedings with 11,000+ google scholar citations, and delivered over 200 invited and keynote lectures. She is a recipient of Georgia Tech Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award for Undergraduate Research, and an Emory University MilliPub Award (for a high-impact paper cited over 1,000 times). Dr. Wang was 2015-2016 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Distinguished Lecturer. She served as an Emerging Area Editor for Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Senior Editor for IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. She has been a panelist for NIH, NSF, Brain Canada, and European Countries. Dr. Wang served as 2017-2019 Vice President of Finance for IEEE EMBS, and AIMBE Nomination Committee Chair. She organized multiple technical conferences in BHI. Her research has been supported by NIH, NSF, CDC, Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Cancer Coalition, Children’s Health Care of Atlanta, Enduring Heart Foundation, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Coulter Foundation, and industrial partners such as Microsoft Research, HP, UCB, and Amazon.