Author: Rashmie Abeysinghe

Guo-Qiang “GQ” Zhang is Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, and Public Health in the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston). He serves as Co-director for the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies and UTHealth”s Vice President and Chief Data Scientist. Before joining UTHealth Houston, he served as the inaugural Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics,  and Associate Director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Kentucky. He spent prior years as professor in the Case School of Engineering and in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, where he created the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine. GQ Zhang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University. His research spans clinical and research informatics, data science, neuroinformatics, and biomedical ontologies. During the last decade, he led a research group that has developed production-strength, informatics tools for data capturing, data management, cohort discovery, and clinical decision support, resulting in over 200 scientific publications and multiple awards across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Licong Cui received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. She is an assistant professor in School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Before joining UTHealth, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and member of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include ontologies and terminologies, neuroinformatics, big data analytics, large-scale data integration and management, and information extraction and retrieval. She has been a Principal Investigatorof several highly competitive research awards funded by the NIH and the NSF. She is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Rashmie Abeysinghe received his B.S. in Computer Science from University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Kentucky. He completed a Summer Internship at the National Library of Medicine, NIH. After completing his Ph.D. study, he joined the Department of Neurology, Mc Govern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston as a Research Scientist. His research interests revolve around biomedical ontologies particularly from a quality assurance perspective, information extraction, and deep learning. His paper won a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2021 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium. His papers were also selected as finalists for both the 2018 and 2019 AMIA Annual Symposium Student Paper Competitions.