Faculty and Professional Affiliates
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Jason Adams
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
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
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
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
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.
Heather Bischel
Research Focus: Sustainable water treatment technologies and systems to protect water resources.
Marianne P. Bitler
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
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
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.
Catherine Brinkley
Research Focus: Citizen engagement in local planning and mapping community food systems
Beth Broome
Creating opportunities and advancing efforts to engage business, industry, and regional stakeholders in supporting equity-driven STEM initiatives across the university.
DataLab collaborated with STEMStrategies in a webscraping and natural language processing project to look for opportunities and gaps in the STEMPortal platform.
C. Titus Brown
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
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
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.
Mary Christopher
Research Focus: Microbial pathogenesis and infectious diseases.
Chen-nee Chuah
Research Focus: Communications and computer networks, and wireless/mobie computing
Professor Chuah serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group and as a postdoc mentor.
Kari Cooper
Research Focus: Geology, specifically the study of volcanic rocks and magma processes.
Professors Cooper and Ratschbacher collaborated with DataLab on a start-up project to analyze and model isotopes from zircon in volcanic and plutonic rocks.
James Crutchfield
Research Focus: Nonlinear dynamics, condensed matter physics, physics of computation, evolutionary dynamics, pattern discovery, dynamics of learning, and distributed robotics
Robert Cudmore
Research Focus: Understanding neuronal and vascular function
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John Daniels
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.
Jesus A. De Loera
Research Focus: His research interests include discrete mathematics, optimization, computational geometry, algebraic combinatorics, and applications in the mathematical sciences.
Sonja Dieterich
Research Focus: Radiology, cancer treatment technology, and medical imaging
Paul Dodd
Research Focus: Nanoscale materials science and applied physics
Melanie Dove
Research Focus: Public health with an emphasis on health behavior and community health.
Brittany Dugger
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
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
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Jonathan Eisen
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
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
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
Research Focus: Using social network analysis to determine why teens bully each other, drink and do drugs, and engage in dating violence
Emilio Ferrer
Research Focus: How intra-individual dynamical information can be retained and used to explain inter-individual differences across a population
Vladimir Filkov
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
Research Focus: Macro- and meso-level economic, demographic, and institutional changes influence poverty and inequality
Dillon Fitch-Polse
Research Focus: behavior and transportation planning with an emphasis on bike shares and other micromobility services using qualitative and quantitative approaches
Andrew Fox
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
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
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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Mark Goldman
Research Focus: Computational neuroscience, neural circuits, and mechanisms of memory and decision-making.
Roger Goldman
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.
Professor Goldman is collaborating with DataLab on several projects including developing machine learning algorithms for medical imaging and automation of liver cancer detection, and is a faculty mentor for the TRANSCEND postdoctoral scholar program.
John Paul Graff
Research Focus: Hematopathology including lymphoma, leukemia, and non-neopastic hematologic processes
Claire Graves
Research Focus: Improving surgical outcomes in diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands, particularly through innovative procedures and new technology. She is also interested in the ways that patients experience their diseases, treatment, and interactions with healthcare and how these affect their daily lives.
James Griesemer
Research Focus: Philosophical, historical, and social understanding of the biological sciences, especially evolutionary biology, genetics, developmental biology, ecology and systematics
Laura Grindstaff
Research Focus: Social psychology, focusing on social movements and cultural institutions.
Professor Grindstaff collaborated with DataLab on a natural language processing project exploring social movements on Twitter.
Rafi Grosglik
Research Focus: Global food systems, sociology of culture, and sustainable agriculture
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Fumika Hamada
Research Focus: Investigating neural circuit mechanisms underlying behavior and how these circuits respond to environmental changes.
Christoph Hanssmann
Research Focus: The politics of health, science and medicine, focusing on relationships between biomedicine and social movements.
Jon Herman
Research Focus: Water resources planning and management
Jacob Hibel
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.
Leah Hibel
Research Focus: Developmental psychology and sociological perspectives on childhood development and well-being.
Martin Hilbert
Research Focus: Role of information, communication, and knowledge in the development of complex social systems
Tessa Hill
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
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
Research Focus: Health economics and analytics with an emphasis in cost-effectiveness, the value of research in healthcare, and health equity
Marcel Holyoak
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
Research Focus: Using game theory, machine learning and text analysis to study U.S. political institutions, especially the federal courts
Lorraine Hwang
Research Focus: Geochemistry and planetary geology, with a focus on planetary materials.
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Yufang Jin
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
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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Kevin Keenan
Stefan Keller
Research Focus: Combining histopathology and high-throughput methods to understand and diagnose lymphoproliferative diseases
Soojong Kim
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
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
Research Focus: Mathematical optimization (integer programming) and computational discrete mathematics
David Kyle
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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Gregory Lanzaro
Research Focus: Vector biology and genetics, focusing on mosquito populations that transmit malaria and other diseases.
Alison Ledgerwood
Research Focus: The contextual factors shaping people’s likes and dislikes, including negativity and positivity biases, attribute preferences, and improving scientific methods and practices.
Pamela Lein
Research Focus: Neurotoxicology, environmental impacts on brain health, and neurodevelopment
Danielle Lemay
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
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
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
Thomas Loehfelm
Research Focus: Medical imaging and radiology, with a focus on diagnostic imaging techniques and clinical applications.
Frank Loge
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
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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David Maggs
Research Focus: Surface occular disease especially feline herpesvirus and tearfilm dysfunction.
Laura Marcu
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 in cardiovascular systems (intravascular diagnostics), oncology (intraoperative delineation of surgical margins). and regenerative medicine (tissue engineering).
Professor Marcu and her lab have collaborated with DataLab on several data visualization, augmented reality, and data processing projects.
Beatriz Martinez-Lopez
Research Focus: Development and implementation of novel epidemiological methods to gain knowledge about the evolution, spread and impact of infectious diseases, and to support health policies
Professor Martinez-Lopez collaborated with DataLab on improvements to the Bioportal project data pipeline and visualization.
Jonna Mazet
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.
David McCourt
Research Focus: The social sources of state action in international politics, with an empirical focus on the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. He also is interested in theory – both sociological and international..
Joshua McCoy
Research Focus: Artificial intelligence in gaming, interactive narrative design, and game studies.
Sarah Rebolloso McCullough
Research Focus: science and technology studies, mobility justice, data equity
Dr. McCullough supports DataLab’s Data Feminism community of practice.
Emily Merchant
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.
Oanh Meyer
Research Focus: Alzheimer’s disease, social determinants of cognitive health, dementia caregiving in diverse communities
Ryan Meyer
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
Dr. Meyer collaborated with DataLab on a project analyzing and modeling 10 years of community collected data on the public use of Marine Protected Areas.
Beth Rose Middleton
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
Professor Middleton has collaborated with DataLab on cartography and spatial analyses for environmental justice research projects.
Colin Milburn
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.”
Lihong Mo
Research Focus: Maternal and fetal medicine
Professor Mo was a Mentored Clinical Research Training Program mentee and has collaborated with DataLab on several projects including informatics of a comprehensive twins database, and integration of uterine waveform data for prediction of pre-term labor risk.
Stephanie Mudge
Research Focus: Combining historical, first-person, and computational methods to map the dynamic relationship between finance, monetary institutions, and democratic politics in the 19th Century United States; development and consequences of transnational relationships between consultancies and political parties in the 21st Century, with a focus on progressive and social democratic politics
Professor Mudge collaborated with DataLab on a start-up project using natural language processing on a newspaper corpus to explore the history of democracy and the role of political experts.
Viji Murali
Oversees IET and leads the development of a coordinated IT technology strategy across the university, including the Davis and Sacramento (Health System) campuses
VP Murali served on DataLab’s advisory group.
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Peter Park
Research Focus: Image processing and data-driven classifications and pattern recognition for improved liver and pancreatic cancer diagnosis and treatment
Sean Peisert
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
Richard Plant
Research Focus: Plant science, agricultural engineering, and crop modeling
Lisa Pruitt
Research Focus: Rural law and policy, particularly the legal challenges faced by rural communities.
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Gerald Quon
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
Research Focus: Theoretical and applied aspects of high dimensionality and extracting complex multivariate dependencies, including correlation-covariance estimation.
Professor Rajaratnam serves as DataLab’s faculty director for research and convenes DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
Barbara Ratschbacher
Research Focus: Continental crust formation in subduction zones
Professors Ratschbacher and Kari Cooper collaborated with DataLab on a start-up project to analyze and model isotopes from zircon in volcanic and plutonic rocks.
Arman Rezaee
Research Focus: Intersections of service delivery, political economy and technology
Jason Rogers
John Rundle
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
Research Focus: Developing materials to capture CO2 and volatile organic compounds, especially from fermentation, and expanding the fundamental understanding of the production of chemicals from winery waste streams and improving sustainability practices.
Professor Runnebaum collaborated with DataLab on a start-up project exploring sensor, drone and satellite data to assess the impact of micro- and macro-climate variability on “terroir” and wine grape juice chemistry, and cartography efforts demonstrating how the chemical and sensorial properties of West Coast-grown Pinot Noirs and are affected by the coast’s varied topography and climate.
Katheryn (Kadee) Russ
Research Focus: Labor economics and the economics of education, particularly in understanding labor market dynamics.
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Junichiro Sageshima
Research Focus: Immunology related to organ transplantation and tolerance mechanisms.
Naoki Saito
Research Focus: applied and computational harmonic analysis
Professor Saito serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.
James N. Sanchirico
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
Research Focus: History of political philosophy, with a specialization in early modern political thought
Tyler Scott
Research Focus: The use of science in decision-making, organizational strategy and innovation (particularly related to infrastructure), and coordination in complex institutional settings.
Professor Scott collaborated with DataLab on a text mining bibliography project exploring citations in public policy.
James Sharpnack
Research Focus: Computationally efficient statistical methodology for understanding complex phenomena in large datasets
Kimberlee Shauman
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.
Ashish Shenoy
Research Focus: Development economics with a focus on migration, labor markets, agricultural productivity, and policy implementation.
Xiaoling Shu
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
Research Focus: Improving clinical outcomes of patients undergoing ablative treatment for arrhythmias.
Professor Sirvastava is collaborating with DataLab on several projects, including an NIH award to develop and test AI approaches for predicting atrial fibrillation, and is a faculty mentor for the TRANSCEND postdoctoral scholar program.
Dawn Sumner
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
Research Focus: Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM); developing innovative techniques and designing policies to enhance water management; analyze existing regulations, infrastructure, and environmental conditions of various basins to recommend strategies for improving water supply to meet current and future societal demands
Professor Solis collaborated with DataLab on a comprehensive text mining and natural language processing project to explore, visualize and communicate the landscape of water research in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mairaj Syed
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
Research Focus: Oversees the daily operations of the Biostatistics Program at the CTSC, which provides statistical assistance and education for health sciences investigators
Dr. Taylor collaborated with the DSI/DataLab on research project predicting sepsis in burn patients.
Duncan Temple Lang
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.
Travis Tollefson
Research Focus: Specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, particularly in cleft palate and craniofacial disorders.
Tony Tyson
Research Focus: Cosmology including dark matter distribution, gravitational lens effects, cosmic shear, the nature of dark energy, and instrumentation for optical astronomy
Professor Tyson was a faculty advisory group member of DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative.
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Craig Warden
Research Focus: Identifying genes that promote accumulation of body fat; studying humans, mice, and C. elegans.
Tobias Warner
Research Focus: African literature, translation studies, and the intersections of literature, language, and politics
Sarah Wescott
Research Focus: Cardiac imaging, cardiac arrhythmias, and diagnostic procedures for heart health
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Jiayi Young
Research Focus: Public-engaged data-driven large-scale installations and social interventions
Zhou Yu 俞舟
Research Focus: Optimizing human-machine communication via studies of multimodal sensing and analysis, speech and natural language processing, machine learning and human-computer interaction