People

Director

 

Serdar Bozdag (CSCE, MATH)

Dr. Serdar Bozdag is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Mathematics with an affiliation with the BioDiscovery Institute at UNT. Dr. Bozdag received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute in NIH. Dr. Bozdag's research goal is to develop open source integrative computational tools to analyze high dimensional biological, clinical and environmental exposure datasets to infer context-specific gene regulatory interactions and modules, and to predict disease associated genes and patient-specific drug response. 

Members

 

College of Engineering

 

Mark Albert (CSCE)

Dr. Mark V. Albert received his PhD in Computational Biology at Cornell University applying efficient coding principles to understand early visual development. He directs the Biomedical AI Lab which collaborates closely with multiple hospital systems applying deep learning to EHR and wearable sensors to improve clinical outcomes in people with mobility impairments.

Sanjukta Bhowmick (CSCE)

Dr. Bhowmick's research is in applying graph theoretic models to analyzing complex systems of interacting entities. She has applied graph-based filters for analyzing biological networks, specifically a chordal graph based filter for identifying important functional units in gene correlation networks and a planar graph based filter for analyzing protein-protein interaction network.

Clement Chan (BMEN)

Dr. Clement Chan is a systems and synthetic biologist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research program involves using bioinformatics method to identify molecular interactions that are conserved and important among protein family members, which is used to guide protein design. Additionally, the Chan group uses transcriptomics and metabolomics approaches to facilitate the development of cellular devices.

Fateme Esmailie (BMEN)

Dr. Fateme Esmailie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Esmailie has received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah prior to joining Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics (CFM) laboratory in the Biomedical Engineering Department, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Esmailie’s research goal is to develop Multiscale Multiphysics fast-response computational methods to predict the outcomes of medical interventions (such as cardiovascular implants and cochlear implants), and establish novel non-invasive methods to prevent the post medical procedure complications.

Heng Fan (CSCE)

Dr. Heng Fan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 2021. His research interests include computer vision, robotics, and medical image analysis.

Yunhe Feng (CSCE)

Dr. Yunhe Feng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas (UNT), where he directs the Responsible AI Lab. Before joining UNT, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow/Scholar at the University of Washington (2020-2022) and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2020. His research interests lie in Responsible AI, Data Security and Privacy, and Social Media.

Xuan Guo (CSCE)

Dr. Xuan Guo's research has centered on using computational methods for large-scale protein identification in microbial communities, where his group has successfully incorporated diverse scoring functions and deep learning techniques to model mass spectrometry measurements. Additionally, he has led projects utilizing cloud computing, machine learning, and statistical analysis to detect genome-wide interactions associated with various diseases. These findings have been published in many reputable journals.

Yuede Ji (CSCE)

Dr. Yuede Ji is an Assistant Professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. He directs the Graph Lab, which focuses on graph-centric security, learning, and computing.

Moo-Yeal Lee (BMEN)

Dr. Moo-Yeal Lee is an associate professor in the department of biomedical engineering at University of North Texas (UNT) and the founder and president of Bioprinting Laboratories Inc. His laboratory is focusing on creating miniaturized tissue constructs containing several layers of human cell types in biomimetic hydrogels (bioinks) on several biochip platforms using "microarray three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting" technology.

Lin Li (BMEN)

Dr. Lin Li obtained his Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering in 2015 at the University of Texas Arlington joint with UT Southwestern Medical Center. He finished his postdoc training in the Department of Neurology at the University of California Los Angeles in 2018. Dr. Li’s research combines multi-modality approaches, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging and electrophysiology to identify novel biomarkers of neurological disease. His research also involves the development of new neuromodulation tools that modify or prevent neurological disease.

Beddhu Murali (CSCE)

Dr. Murali is a Clinical Associated Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He recently reformulated the 200-year-old linear regression method to use bounded linear computations and has extended this approach to anywhere a linear operator is used, especially in the hidden layers of neural networks. He has filed a provisional patent for these methods. More recently he has developed a full fine-tuning technique for foundational models that keeps the original pre-trained weights frozen and uses lower fine-tuning parameter counts. He is developing applications in life sciences and other domains using his techniques.

Tejasvi Parupudi (CSCE)

Dr. Tejasvi Parupudi received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University where he developed implantable cancer therapeutics based on ablation and electrolytic technologies. He worked on developing wearable sensor integration informatics as an Application Scientist at Zeblok (now Zeblok Computational) and developing testing strategies for wireless communication from wearables as a postdoctoral associate at UT Dallas. He now collaborates with ICU physicians and uses healthcare databases and ML algorithms to create tools for improving clinical outcomes for brain disorders and cancers. 

JungHwan Oh (CSCE)

JungHwan Oh joined in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of North Texas in 2006 and now he is an associated professor in the same department. He has established a medical video research with the collaboration of Iowa State University and Mayo Clinic in 2003. This research focuses on the medical video analyses and mining. As results of these research, a number of proposals have been granted from National Agencies. He is the author or coauthor of about 120 journal articles, book chapters, and international conference papers.

Ajita Rattani (CSCE)

Dr. Ajita Rattani is an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of CSE, Univ. of North Texas. She is the director of the Visual Computer and Biometrics Security Lab. Her lab's mission is to conduct cutting-edge research on Fairness in AI, Biometric Security, Multimodal Fusion, Audio-Visual Analysis, Manipulated Social Media Detection, On-device AI and Medical Vision.

Weishi Shi (CSCE)

Dr. Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research centers around the intersection of human and machine learning, specifically focusing on practical and theoretical active learning methodologies. By developing a bio-plausible memory framework, he aims to address challenges such as the einstellung effect and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning, aiming to achieve data-efficient machine learning and gain deeper insights into human learning behavior.

Zeenat Tariq (CSCE)

Dr. Zeenat Tariq is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, and her master’s from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. Her research interests are building innovative architectures on deep learning platforms. She further researches providing low-cost solutions using deep learning analytics in the environment and health care domain. She also extended her interests by investigating the edge intelligence collaborative environment in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and event-driven factors. Zeenat got several scholarships and funds to continue her multi-discipline research career.

Huaxiao ‘Adam’ Yang (BMEN)

Dr. Huaxiao “Adam” Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNT. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. degree from Clemson University in 2015 and worked at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow from 2015 to 2020. He was also an American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellow from 2018 to 2020. Dr. Yang’s lab focuses on cardiovascular tissue engineering by applying cutting-edge multiscale biomedical engineering tools and human pluripotent stem cell technologies to understand and treat human cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), such as myocardial infarction, familial cardiomyopathies, congenital heart diseases, and cardiovascular toxicity.

Jing Yuan (CSCE)

Jing Yuan is an assistant professor with the CSE Department at UNT. Her research focuses on AI for equitable, robust, and efficient decision making, integrating methods from machine learning, optimization, and social networks. Her research has been published in AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS and CIKM.

College of Science

 

Ana Paula Alonso (BIOL)

Dr. Alonso is a Plant Biochemist. She is Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Director of the BioAnalytical Facility, and Associate Director of the BioDiscovery Institute. She is an expert in carbon partitioning, mass spectrometry, and oil biosynthesis in oilseed crops. Dr. Alonso combines multi-omics approaches (fluxomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics) for various projects currently funded by the DOE, USDA, NIH, and NSF.

Mauricio Antunes (BIOL)

Dr. Antunes’ research focuses on understanding mechanisms that control gene expression in plants, including the long-distance movement of gene regulatory signals through the plant vasculature. We employ analysis of whole-plant and tissue-specific transcriptomic data to uncover the role of small RNAs, particularly microRNAs, in regulating expression of protein-coding genes in response to biotic and abiotic stresses. These mechanisms are then used in the development of synthetic genetic circuits that allow precise control of transgene expression in plants to bring about novel functions, such as bioproduction of high-value molecules.

Brian Ayre (BIOL)

Research in Dr. Ayre's lab revolves around the phloem transport system of plants and how it functions as a whole-plant communication network to enable disparate organs to function as an integrated complete organism. Within this broad context, we have projects in (1) the role of the phloem in coordinating carbon metabolism and nutrient utilization between photosynthetic source leaves and heterotrophic sink organs and (2) the role of the phloem in transporting signaling molecules from leaves to growing tissues to mediate source-control of sink growth and development. We utilize organ-specific metabolite analysis to study nutrient partitioning and high-resolution transcriptomics to address long-distance signaling in developmental processes. This research requires and benefits from computationally demanding metabolic modeling and gene-network analysis.

Rajeev Azad (BIOL, MATH, CSCE)

Dr. Azad is an interdisciplinary researcher with joint appointment in the departments of Biologicals Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Azad’s interests lie in the broad area of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, specifically, in the development and application of mathematical and computational methods to understand how microorganisms innovate to adapt to changes in environment, analysis of large omics datasets to determine how organisms respond to stress at the molecular and physiological level, and investigation of structural and functional features in genomes and elucidation of their relationships in the context of evolution.

Kent Chapman (BIOL)

Dr. Kent Chapman earned a B.A. degree in biology from Lycoming College, and a Ph.D. degree in botany from Arizona State University. He studied plant biochemistry as an NSF postdoctoral fellow before taking a tenure-track faculty position at the University of North Texas (UNT). Chapman has developed an internationally-recognized research program in plant biochemistry and cell biology, specifically in the area of plant lipid metabolism.
He currently is Regents Professor at UNT and serves as Director of the BioDiscovery Institute, a UNT institute of research excellence with a focus on developing renewable sources of materials and products from bio-based production systems. Current research interests include-- lipid signaling in plants, biogenesis of lipid droplets in plant cells, engineering plant lipids for human health and industrial applications, and lipidomics in tissues and organelles.

Andrew Gregory (BIOL)

Dr. Gregory is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at UNT. His research is at the nexus of geospatial science, population genetics, and wildlife ecology. The goal of his work is to apply recent advances in geospatial statistics and molecular genetics to understand the multi-faceted way that humans are impacting wildlife and devise pragmatic solutions to enable to coexistence of biodiversity on anthropic landscapes.

Yanyan He (MATH, CSCE)

Dr. Yanyan He has a joint appointment from UNT Mathematics and Computer Science and Engineering. Having received her PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Florida State University in 2013, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute of University of Utah, and an assistant professor at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Dr. He's research focus is in uncertainty quantification, uncertainty modeling, Bayesian methods, uncertainty visualization, uncertain data fusion, fuzzy sets and fuzzy measures.

Calvin Henard (BIOL)

Dr. Henard has extensive expertise in microbial metabolism and physiology. His laboratory’s current efforts are focused on understanding single carbon metabolic pathways and their regulation in methanotrophic bacteria with the goal of developing sustainable biotechnologies for conversion of waste gases to valuable products.

Patrick Horn (BIOL)

Dr. Patrick Horn is an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Biological Sciences and member of the BioDiscovery Institute. His research interests include plant redox processes that impact lipid metabolism, photosynthesis, and bioproduct engineering. He uses a range of computational tools to analyze protein structures as well as omics datasets spanning genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics.

Junhyeon Kwon (MATH)

Dr. Junhyeon Kwon, currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas, previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Houston from 2021 to 2023. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Seoul National University in August 2021. His research is broadly focused on the development of statistical methods for spatio- temporal data analysis, multivariate statistics, and environmental statistics.

Jianguo Liu (MATH)

Dr. Jianguo Liu is interested in math modeling, optimization, numerical methods, and machine learning, in particular their applications in image processing, medical diagnosis, financial forecasting, and solution of differential equations.

Shuang Liu (MATH)

Dr. Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at University of North Texas. She was a SEW assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at University of California at San Diego during 2021-2023. She received her PhD in 2019 from Department of Mathematics at University of South Carolina. Dr. Liu’s research interests are in numerical methods for free boundary problems and mathematics of scientific computing, with applications in ecology specially in the field of population dynamics, plasma physics, computational biology, and biological physics.

Antonella Longo (BIOL)

Dr. Longo is a structural biologist interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms governing complex bio molecules. In particular her research is focused on nitrate and iron transporters implicated in supporting nitrogen fixation in legume plants. Dr. Longo employs genome mining, phylogenetic analysis and structural modeling in her research and will benefit from the center.

Amie Lund (BIOL)

Dr. Amie Lund is an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences and the Director of the Advanced Environmental Research Institute. Dr. Lund’s NIH-funded research program focuses on investigating the mechanisms by which air pollution exposure promotes human inflammatory disease states, including obesity/metabolic syndrome, vascular disease, and neurodegenerative disorders, using both in vivo and in vitro models.
Specific signaling pathways currently being analyzed include gut microbiota metabolites, the renin-angiotensin system, adipokines, and (gut and steroid) hormones.

Vanessa M. Macias (BIOL)

Dr. Macias is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at UNT. Her research is in the areas of piRNA biology and mosquito-virus interactions.

Roisin McGarry (BIOL)

Dr. Roisin McGarry’s research investigates plant architecture, specifically the genetic networks regulating flowering and determinate growth patterns, with the long-term goal of enhancing crop productivity. Using non-model, woody perennials, her research aims to 1) develop tools to elucidate and manipulate architecture regulation; 2) investigate meristematic signals regulating patterns of indeterminate and determinate growth; and 3) explore the genetic networks regulating meristem size and fate. Her research benefits from robust bioinformatic analyses and computational strategies.

Jyoti Shah (BIOL)

Dr. Shah's research dwells on the cross-kingdom interaction between plants, and microbes and insects. The focus is on understanding the molecular-genetic and physiological basis of these interactions that result in disease and defense. A large component of this work involves studying the impact of mutations in individual plant genes on these interactions and requires employing omic tools like transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics that require extensive bioinformatic analysis, including student and postdoc training.

Xiaoqiang Wang (BIOL)

Dr. Xiaoqiang Wang, a Research Associate Professor in the Biodiscovery Institute and Department of Biological Sciences, is working on protein structure, computational protein design and engineering. He obtained a federal grant from the National Science Foundation to study structure and function of glycosyltransferases, and also received two NIH grants to engineer glycosyltransferases for metabolizing anticancer drugs. He has published original research articles in prestigious journals including Cell, Science, Molecular Cell, Nature Structural Biology, Plant Cell, and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

College of Information

 

Tozammel Hossain (INFO)

Dr. Tozammel Hossain is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at UNT. He received his Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech and pursued postdoctoral training at the University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute. His research interests broadly lie in applied machine learning and data science, emphasizing solving problems in bioinformatics, health informatics, and social science.

Ting Xiao (INFO)

Dr. Ting Xiao is an Assistant Professor of Data Science specializing in using statistical and deep learning tools to extract meaningful insights from large datasets. Her expertise lies in implementing unsupervised and supervised learning techniques for data dimensionality reduction and creating user-friendly interfaces for data interpretation and visualization. Her contributions extend to creating impactful decision-making models and software in collaboration with clinical partners.