For Students
Prospective Graduate Students
If you are interested in working with me as a graduate student, please first apply to and be admitted to the Biomedical Informatics Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh.
Please do not contact me by email regarding research opportunities or supervision before you have been admitted to the program. Graduate admissions are handled centrally through the program.
Once admitted, you are welcome to contact me to discuss potential research opportunities.
Who I Work Best With
My research group is generally a good fit for students who:
Enjoy examining established assumptions and considering alternative approaches to scientific problems.
Are interested in understanding the reasoning behind different methods and asking unconventional scientific questions.
Are motivated by the potential clinical applications of their work, including identifying therapeutic targets, improving treatment decisions, and generating clinically useful knowledge.
Are interested in both developing ideas and carrying out the mathematical, computational, or empirical work needed to evaluate them.
Are willing to work through technical challenges and follow projects through to completion.
Students in my group generally begin with computational biomedical discovery, working on specific scientific or clinical questions using real-world data. This experience helps students develop scientific judgment, understand the limitations of existing methods, and identify problems that may require new methodological approaches.
Students who become interested in foundational methods development may subsequently pursue that direction. I generally prefer this progression because experience with biomedical research problems provides a useful foundation for deciding which new statistical or computational methods are worth developing. Students are not expected to pursue methods development, however, and can focus on computational biomedical discovery.
I do not expect incoming students to have already developed all the skills described above, but I do expect an interest in developing them.
Who Might Be Happier Elsewhere
The following areas are generally not the primary focus of my research group:
Primarily descriptive studies of disease, such as characterizing molecular profiles, identifying imaging patterns, or documenting associations.
Development of algorithms or theoretical frameworks without a clear connection to potential clinical applications.
Research centered primarily on conceptual exploration rather than the implementation, evaluation, and completion of research projects.
Large-scale software engineering, infrastructure development, or computational platform development as the main research objective.
Research focused primarily on improving predictive performance or achieving benchmark results.
Research motivated primarily by the popularity of a particular technology or research direction.
Short-term research experiences primarily intended to support applications to college, graduate school, medical school, or residency programs.
These are all perfectly reasonable research interests, and students who wish to focus on them may find other faculty whose research programs are better suited to their goals. The above distinctions concern the primary objectives of research projects, rather than restrictions on particular methods or technologies. Descriptive analyses, established methods, emerging technologies, and software engineering can all be important components of my research when they contribute to a clinical objective.
I hope this information helps prospective students assess whether their research interests and preferred working styles align with the opportunities available in my group.