Faculty and Professional Affiliates
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Jason Adams
Associate Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Director of Data and Analytics Strategy, UC Davis Health
Research Focus: Application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, physiologic sensors, and electronic health record data to improve critical illness diagnostics and intensive care
Professor Adams serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group. DataLab collaborated with Dr. Adams on research to predict COVID admissions to the UC Davis hospital during the height of the pandemic.
Nick Anderson
Director of Informatics Research, Robert D. Cardiff Professor of Informatics, UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento
Research Focus: Leading the development of the research informatics capabilities across the health system with focus on access to clinical data for research and secondary use, data policy and data sharing, and sustainable informatics infrastructure development
Professor Anderson serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group and was an Associate Director for DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative.
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Tom Beamish
Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: Risks, hazards, and the environment; community politics and social movements; institutions, organizations and the economy; and science, technology and innovation studies
Hemant Bhargava
Professor of Management
Chair, MBSA Program
Jerome and Elise Suran Chair of Technology Management
Research Focus: Technology management and the information technology industry, including the use of IT in clinical health care
Professor Bhargava serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
Magali Billen
Professor and Department Chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Research Focus: Uses numerical simulations of visco-plastic flow to understand how Earth’s tectonic plates deform as they sink back into the mantle at subduction zones
Professor Billen collaborates with DataLab on the 3D Visualizer for ASPECT project, which builds from the prior UC Davis KeckCAVES project and the current DataLab Vrui platform for research with virtual reality.
Marianne P. Bitler
Professor of Economics
Research Focus: The effects of government safety net programs on disadvantaged groups, economic demography, health economics, public economics, and the economics of education
Gina Bloom
Professor of English
Research Focus: Early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare and drama, gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance, sound studies, digital arts/humanities, and education
Professor Bloom collaborated with DataLab on a research project studying the ModLab Shakespearean video game project “Play the Knave.”
Amber Boydstun
Associate Professor of Political Science
Research Focus: Media framing and public opinion data
Professor Boydstun serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group, and collaborated with DataLab on a project looking at patterns in media framing in USA newspapers over time.
C. Titus Brown
Professor of Veterinary Medicine
Research Focus: Methods and software development for -omics data analysis
Professor Brown is a Faculty Director at DataLab and serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
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Colin Cameron
Professor of Economics
Research Focus: Economic theory and microeconmetrics for cross-section data, especially count data, with applications to labor and health economic data
Professor Cameron serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
Nipavan Chiamvionvmat
Professor of Cardiology and Internal Medicine, Roger Tatarian Endowed Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine
Research Focus: Investigating the roles of small conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channels in cardiac function and their potential as therapeutic targets for atrial fibrillation, alongside exploring the beneficial effects of soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors on cardiac remodeling and arrhythmias.
Chen-nee Chuah
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Focus: Communications and computer networks, and wireless/mobie computing
Professor Chuah serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group and as a postdoc mentor.
James Crutchfield
Professor of Physics
Research Focus: Nonlinear dynamics, condensed matter physics, physics of computation, evolutionary dynamics, pattern discovery, dynamics of learning, and distributed robotics
Robert Cudmore
Assistant Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology, School of Medicine
Research Focus: Understanding neuronal and vascular function
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John Daniels
Statistical Programming Consultant, LS IT
Maintains the SSDS central research systems and provides consulting for statistical and mathematical software applications used by social scientists. He has a background in political science and has worked for over 20 years in the fields of information technology and quantitative research support.
Paul Dodd
Associate Vice Chancellor for Interdisciplinary Research and Strategic Initiatives, Office of Research
Research Focus: Nanoscale materials science and applied physics
Brittany Dugger
Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Research Focus: Understanding heterogeneity within neurodegenerative diseases and the interaction of peripheral changes to aging and neurodegenerative diseases
Professor Dugger co-leads the Machine Learning Working Group at UCDH, and has collaborated with DataLab on health equity research.
Joe Dumit
Professor of Science and Technology Studies, and Anthropology
Research Focus: Uses ethnography, STS and performance practice-as-research to study financialized corporate capitalism; data science and immersive visualization; the history of computational notions of logic, irrationality, brains and personhood; anatomies of agency and movement (fascia, improvisation, and training); and game design as social research
E
Jonathan Eisen
Professor, Department of Evolution and Ecology, Genome Center, Center for Population Biology, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine, Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute
Research Focus: Ecology, evolution and function of microbes and microbial communities, and develops phylogeny-driven computational tools to analyze genomic and metagenomic sequence data
MV Eitzel
Postdoctoral Scholar of Community and Citizen Science / Feminist Research Institute
Research Focus: The intersection of data science, participatory action research, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). This combination is relevant and timely as data science becomes an increasingly dominant way to know about both society and the environment we depend on.
Dr. Eitzel collaborated with DataLab on the Marine Protected Area Usage Analysis project, on grant proposals, collaborative research on sustainable development goals, and educational curriculum on responsible data science and data equity.
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Marc Tancredi Facciotti
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Research Focus: Understand biological organizational principles occurring at the cellular, molecular and genetic scales.
Professor Tancredi is collaborating with DataLab on a network analysis of introductory biology curriculum, learning goals, and online educational resource (OER) engagement.
Robert Faris
Professor of Psychology
Research Focus: Using social network analysis to determine why teens bully each other, drink and do drugs, and engage in dating violence
Emilio Ferrer
Professor of Psychology
Research Focus: How intra-individual dynamical information can be retained and used to explain inter-individual differences across a population
Vladimir Filkov
Professor of Computer Science
Research Focus: Empirical software engineering, systems biology and gene networks in plants, applied network theory, data mining and algorithms, open source software sustainability, health data science
Professor Filkov was DataLab’s faculty Director for Translational Data Science from 2021-2024. He collaborates with DataLab on health data science grants and mentors a postdoctoral scholar through DataLab’s TRANSCEND program.
Ryan Finnigan
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: Macro- and meso-level economic, demographic, and institutional changes influence poverty and inequality
Dillon Fitch-Polse
Institute of Transportation Studies, Co-Director of BicyclingPlus Research Collaborative
Research Focus: behavior and transportation planning with an emphasis on bike shares and other micromobility services using qualitative and quantitative approaches
Andrew Fox
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Research Focus: neuroscience of social and emotional behavior in humans and non-human primates with a focus on emotional and social decision-making
Professor Fox founded DataLab’s Python User Group, which meets biweekly for drop-in Python help and community building throughout the academic year.
Seth Fray
Assistant Professor of Communication, Computational Communication Designated Emphasis
Research Focus: Human decision behavior in designed social environments, such as sports, games, and laboratory settings
Professor Frey has taught workshops at DataLab.
David Furlow
Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior
Research Focus: Molecular basis of hormones, gene expression and editing in model organisms, undergraduate education.
Professor Furlow worked with DataLab as we developed our data science experiential education curriculum.
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Roger Goldman
Assistant Professor of Radiology
Research Focus: Novel technological solutions to complex problems in diagnostic and interventional medicine and surgery. In addition to research, he collaborates in training the next generation of thought leaders in interventional radiology and biomedical engineering.
John Paul Graff
Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Research Focus: Hematopathology including lymphoma, leukemia, and non-neopastic hematologic processes
James Griesemer
Professor of Philosophy
Research Focus: Philosophical, historical, and social understanding of the biological sciences, especially evolutionary biology, genetics, developmental biology, ecology and systematics
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Jon Herman
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Focus: Water resources planning and management
Jacob Hibel
Associate Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: Sociological and demographic approaches to study the sources and implications of educational stratification with focuses on: special education inequalities, immigration and educational inequality, school readiness and early educational stratification, and education expansion and social change in contemporary China.
Professor Hibel collaborated with DataLab on a project to extract data from California Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs), a state-wide reporting tool that seeks to improve student outcomes.
Martin Hilbert
Associate Professor of Communication
Research Focus: Role of information, communication, and knowledge in the development of complex social systems
Tessa Hill
Associate Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Public Scholarship & Engagement; Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Research Focus: climate change, responses of marine species to environmental perturbation
Professor Hill collaborated with DataLab on a research project to model changes in ocean acidification over space and time along the West Coast.
Robert Hijmans
Professor of Environmental Science and Policy
Research Focus: Agriculture, ecology and and human health, with particular interest in the role of agricultural development in Africa and in the role of biodiversity in agriculture
Jeffrey Hoch
Professor and Chief of the Division of Health Policy and Management, Department of Public Health Sciences
Research Focus: Health economics and analytics with an emphasis in cost-effectiveness, the value of research in healthcare, and health equity
Marcel Holyoak
Professor of Environmental Science and Policy
Research Focus: The importance of spatial dynamics to populations and communities, with specific interest in metacommunities and the role of spatial dynamics, conservation of threatened animal species, the ecology of organismal movement, and metapopulation persistence
Ryan Hubert
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Research Focus: Using game theory, machine learning and text analysis to study U.S. political institutions, especially the federal courts
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Yufang Jin
Associate Professor, Land, Air and Water Resources
Research Focus: Remote sensing from satellite, airborne, and UAV/drone platforms to monitor ecosystem dynamics, crop conditions and yields, and to study the associated drivers and feedbacks
Christine Kreuder Johnson
Professor of Veterinary Medicine
Research Focus: Wildlife epidemiology, with special emphasis on wildlife population health and emerging infectious diseases with significance to public health and health security.
Dr. Johnson collaborated with DataLab on a research project to computationally detect emerging zoonotic diseases from the literature.
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Stefan Keller
Associate Professor of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology
Research Focus: Combining histopathology and high-throughput methods to understand and diagnose lymphoproliferative diseases
Soojong Kim
Assistant Professor of Communications
Research Focus: Computational algorithmic developments and management of complex biological data as well as the quantification of biological systems (morphometry) and the formation (morphogenesis) and evolution (morphodynamics) of molecular shapes
Patrice Koehl
Professor of Computer Science
Founding Director of the Data Science Initiative
Research Focus: Computational algorithmic developments and management of complex biological data as well as the quantification of biological systems (morphometry) and the formation (morphogenesis) and evolution (morphodynamics) of molecular shapes
Professor Kohl was the founding director of DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative.
Matthias Köppe
Professor of Mathematics
Research Focus: Mathematical optimization (integer programming) and computational discrete mathematics
David Kyle
Associate Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: transnational political movements and networks; ethnography and historical analysis
Professor Kyle collaborated with DataLab on a project chronicling the rise of “creativity” through text analysis of American Newspapers.
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Alison Ledgerwood
Professor of Psychology
Research Focus: The contextual factors shaping people’s likes and dislikes, including negativity and positivity biases, attribute preferences, and improving scientific methods and practices.
Danielle Lemay
Research Molecular Biologist at USDA
Associate Adjust Professor of Nutrition
Research Focus: Applies big data techniques, including sequencing technologies and machine learning, to understand the effects of diet on human health. She leads the nutrition cluster within the AI Institute for Food Systems at UC Davis.
Tim Lenoir
Professor of Science and Technology Studies
Professor of Cinema and Digital Media
Research Focus: History of biomedicine, particularly on areas related to the impact of of computer technologies such as bioinformatics, robotics and artificial intelligence on contemporary biomedicine
Siwei Liu
Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
Research Focus: Statistical methods for analyzing intensive longitudinal data, in particular in the frameworks of multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, time series analysis, and functional data analysis
Frank Loge
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Focus: The water-energy nexus, water and energy efficiency in urban and agriculture systems, sustainable building design, water reuse, conservation based water rate design, and data analytics
Mark Lubell
Professor of Environmental Science and Policy
Research Focus: Cooperation problems and decision-making in environmental, agricultural, and public policy including include water management, sustainable agriculture, adaptive decision-making, climate change policy, local government policy, transportation behavior, plant disease management, invasive species, and policy/social network analysis
Professor Lubell collaborated with DataLab on a water data informatics project.
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Laura Marcu
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Director, NIH-NIBIB National Center for Interventional Biophotonics Technologies (NCIBT)
Research Focus: Researching and engineering fluorescence lifetime-based instrumentation and multimodal imaging systems that enable studies of the molecular, metabolic and morphologic changes in living systems ranging from biological cells and animal models to human patients. Her research targets unique applications that impact clinical management of critical human disease, with an emphasis on three distinct areas: cardiovascular systems (intravascular diagnostics), oncology (intraoperative delineation of surgical margins) and regenerative medicine (tissue engineering).
Beatriz Martinez-Lopez
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Research Focus: As a historian of science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Emily focuses on the quantitative human sciences and technologies of human measurement
Professor Merchant co-leads DataLab’s Data Feminism community of practice and has collaborated with DataLab on several research projects including her work on molecular eugenics.
Jonna Mazet
Vice Provost of Grand Challenges, Professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology, Founding Executive Director of the One Health Institute
Research Focus: Epidemiology; advancement of global health problem solving, especially the understanding of emerging infectious diseases and the conservation of threatened species and ecosystems; solving tomorrow’s wicked research problems
VP Mazet collaborated with DataLab on a text and natural language processing project exploring interdisciplinary research expertise at UC Davis.
Sarah Rebolloso McCullough
Associate Director, Feminist Research Institute
Research Focus: science and technology studies, mobility justice, data equity
Dr. McCullough engages with DataLab’s Data Feminism community of practice.
Emily Merchant
Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies
Research Focus: As a historian of science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Emily focuses on the quantitative human sciences and technologies of human measurement
Professor Merchant co-leads DataLab’s Data Feminism community of practice and has collaborated with DataLab on several research projects including her work on molecular eugenics.
Ryan Meyer
Executive Director, Center for Community and Citizen Science
Research Focus: Science funding, the role of public values in our science system, boundary organizations and co-production of science for decision making, and public participation in research.
Beth Rose Middleton
Professor of Native American Studies
Research Focus: Native environmental policy and activism using conservation tools in relation to environmental and climate justice, fire policy, intergenerational trauma and healing, Native land stewardship, climate change, qualitative GIS
Colin Milburn
Professor of English and Science and Technology Studies, Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities
Research Focus: Relationships of literature, science and technology
Professor Milburn collaborated with DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative, on a research study involving the ModLab video game “Play the Knave.”
Stephanie Mudge
Associate Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: The 19th Century United States, combining historical, first-person, and computational methods to map the dynamic relationship between finance, monetary institutions, and democratic politics. A second component focuses on the 21st Century development and consequences of transnational relationships between consultancies and political parties, with a focus on progressive and social democratic politics.
Viji Murali
Chief Information Office and Vice Provost of Information and Educational Technology (IET) at UC Davis
Oversees IET and leads the development of a coordinated IT technology strategy across the university, including the Davis and Sacramento (Health System) campuses
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Peter Park
Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology
Research Focus: Image processing and data-driven classifications and pattern recognition for improved liver and pancreatic cancer diagnosis and treatment
Sean Peisert
Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, UC Davis;
Adjunct Professor, Health Informatics, UC Davis School of Medicine
Research Focus: A broad cross section of usable and useful computer security and privacy solutions, particularly in enabling secure and privacy-preserving scientific data analysis in distributed, high-performance, and cloud computing environments
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Gerald Quon
Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Research Focus: Using classic machine learning and deep neural networks to build quantitative models of the cell and address a wide range of questions, including how genetics influences a person’s risk of complex diseases and how cells can be reprogrammed from one type to another for regenerative medicine
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Bala Rajaratnam
Professor of Statistics
Research Focus: Theoretical and applied aspects of high dimensionality and extracting complex multivariate dependencies, including correlation-covariance estimation.
Arman Rezaee
Assistant Professor of Economics
Research Focus: Intersections of service delivery, political economy and technology
John Rundle
Professor of Physics, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Research Focus: Developing the theoretical and computational methods needed to understand classes of driven, non-equilibrium threshold systems (e.g., networks of earthquake faults, neural networks, superconductors and semiconductors, the World Wide Web, and political, social and ecological systems).
Ron Runnebaum
Associate Professor of Viticulture and Enology (Chemical Engineer)
Research Focus: Developing materials to capture CO2 and volatile organic compounds, especially from fermentation.
Developing fundamental understanding for the production of chemicals from winery waste streams.
Designing solid-state materials for the replacement of solution-based treatments, particularly those that could improve sustainability.
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Naoki Saito
Professor of Mathematics
Research Focus: applied and computational harmonic analysis
Professor Saito serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
James N. Sanchirico
Professor of Environmental Science and Policy
Research Focus: Applies empirical and theoretical quantitative methods to study the design and evaluation of policy instruments for the conservation of natural resources with particular interest in the economic analysis of policy design, implementation, and evaluation for marine and terrestrial species conservation, and the development of economic-ecological models for forecasting the effects of resource management policies
John Scott
Professor of Political Science
Research Focus: History of political philosophy, with a specialization in early modern political thought
Tyler Scott
Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Chair, Environmental Policy & Management Graduate Group
Research Focus: The use of science in decision-making, organizational strategy and innovation (particularly related to infrastructure), and coordination in complex institutional settings.
James Sharpnack
Assistant Professor of Statistics
Research Focus: Computationally efficient statistical methodology for understanding complex phenomena in large datasets
Kimberlee Shauman
Professor of Sociology
Research Focus: Social stratification, social demography, and family, kinship and gender
Professor Shauman collaborated with DataLab on a project exploring biases in UC hiring practices.
Xiaoling Shu
Professor of Sociology
Director of East Asian Studies
Research Focus: The impact of market transition and globalization on gender inequalities, subjective sense of well-being, and gender, family, marriage and sexual behaviors and attitudes
Uma Sirvastava
Director of Arrhythmia Services, Internal Medicine
Research Focus: Improving clinical outcomes of patients undergoing ablative treatment for arrhythmias.
Dawn Sumner
Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Research Focus: Reconstructing ancient environments on early Earth and Mars and the early evolution of bacteria, including the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis
Sam Sandoval Solis
Professor of Land, Air and Water Resources, Cooperative Extension Specialist in Water Management
Research Focus: Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM); aims to develop innovative techniques and design policies to enhance water management. They analyze existing regulations, infrastructure, and environmental conditions of various basins to recommend strategies for improving water supply to meet current and future societal demands, all while ensuring the hydrologic variation needed to maintain the ecological and environmental integrity of the basin.
Mairaj Syed
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Research Focus: The history of Islamic legal and ethical thought, particularly areas dealing with public law, family law, and politics
Professor Syed collaborated with DataLab on a project to computationally generate accurate dating of hadiths.
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Sandra Taylor
Principal Statistician, Clinical and Transnational Science Center
Oversees the daily operations of the Biostatistics Program at the CTSC, which provides statistical assistance and education for health sciences investigators
Duncan Temple Lang
Professor of Statistics, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies
Research Focus: Developing and applying statistical and scientific computing infrastructure and technologies, including technologies and algorithms for parallel and distributed computing
Professor Temple Lang was the Director of DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative, and engaged in many collaborative research projects and training efforts.
Tony Tyson
Distinguished Professor of Physics
Research Focus: Cosmology including dark matter distribution, gravitational lens effects, cosmic shear, the nature of dark energy, and instrumentation for optical astronomy
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Jiayi Young
Assistant Professor of Design
Research Focus: Public-engaged data-driven large-scale installations and social interventions
Zhou Yu 俞舟
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Research Focus: Optimizing human-machine communication via studies of multimodal sensing and analysis, speech and natural language processing, machine learning and human-computer interaction