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!
Vanathi Gopalakrishnan
Biography
Titles:
Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics (Primary), Bioengineering, Clinical and Translational Science (Secondary)
Director, PRoBE Laboratory for Pattern Recognition from Biomedical Evidence, School of Medicine University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Gopalakrishnan is a tenured associate professor of biomedical Informatics. Her primary research focus over the past two decades has been on biomarker discovery from multiple types of biomedical data via novel integrative modeling using hybrid machine learning methods being developed and tested in her lab. She is fundamentally interested in technologies for data mining and discovery that allow incorporation of prior knowledge. Her lab has applied novel variants of rule learning techniques for biomarker discovery, prediction and monitoring of diverse diseases including neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, lung, breast and esophageal cancers, and parasitic infectious disease such as Helminths. Multiple types of ‘omic’ data obtained from genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and microbiome profiling have been analyzed, leading to insights regarding biomarkers and molecular mechanisms that underlie chronic disease. Biomarkers for early detection of lung and esophageal cancers have been validated across institutional studies. Dr. Gopalakrishnan was a co-leader of the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics core for a decade as part of the NCI-funded Lung SPORE project. She also was the first formal director of the CoSBBI (Computer Science, Biology, and Biomedical Informatics) program which now forms a core part of the Hillman Academy that trains rising high school juniors and seniors in cancer related STEM research. Dr. Gopalakrishnan also served recently as the director of the Intelligent Systems Program in the School of Computing and Information, which is a highly selective multidisciplinary applied AI graduate degree program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research includes investigating hypotheses about drug-treatment outcomes in chronic disease using large scale networks of electronic health records.
Areas of Interest:
Rule Learning Hybrid Algorithms – Design and Development,
Multi-modal Biomedical Data Science – Modeling and Analysis,
Biomarker Discovery, Knowledge Based Systems
Predictive Modeling for Precision Medicine and Health Care, Clinical Decision Support