Directory
This Directory includes Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni selectable by category, search or alphabetical by last name. Over 110 students have graduated from the Department of Biomedical Informatics (25+ PhD, 50+ MS, 25+ Certificate). The diversity of careers available to DBMI alumnus is evident in their biographies. Many of our graduates are teaching and performing research in academic institutions, such as Vanderbilt University, Arizona State University, and New York University while others have entered private industry with companies such as Cerner Corporation and Boston Scientific; some have positions in government agencies, such as the NIH and AHRQ, while others are at major medical centers, serving in roles such as Chief Medical Information Officer. We maintain a database of the career paths of our graduates. If you are an alumnus, please contact us if you would like to submit or update information!
Jenna Young
Biography
Personal statement about time at DBMI:
Jenna Schabdach (now Young) began her studies at DBMI in Fall 2016. For her first lab rotation, she worked with Dr. Kayhan Batmanghelich on a medical imaging and machine learning project to extract features from thoracic CT scans and use them to estimate the contribution of different regions of the images to a COPD diagnosis. She took a second lab rotation at the Pediatric Imaging Research Center at UPMC Children’s and chose to continue at PIRC for the duration of her PhD program. With guidance from Dr. Ashok Panigrahy and Dr. Rafael Ceschin, she structured a pipeline for performing a novel motion correction technique on resting-state functional MRIs of pediatric brain scans. She evaluated this pipeline using fetal, neonatal, and school-aged pediatric images and used unsupervised machine learning techniques to examine the relationships between motion properties and patient ages. During the summer of 2018, she took a graduate student internship at Phillips Respironics and contributed to two sleep-oriented machine learning projects. She successfully defended her dissertation in March 2020.
Publications/Conference Proceedings:
Jenna’s works can be found through her ORCiD page: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3923-5846
Current Activities:
Jenna began working at the Brain-Gene-Development Lab ([https://www.bgdlab.org/](https://www.bgdlab.org/)) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in November 2020. She currently holds a research scientist position with the goal of becoming a staff scientist. Her current work is focused on curating clinically-acquired neurological MRIs, analyzing structural differences in patient brains, natural language processing of radiology reports, and often tech support. She lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband and in her free time can be found rock climbing at local gyms, crocheting, or raising money for the Extra Life charity to support the kids at UPMC Children’s.