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Faculty and Professional Affiliates

A


Sasha Abramsky

Lecturer, Undergraduate Writing Program

Research Focus: Writing, journalism, and social issues

Profile at UWP

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health
DataLab COVID Hospital Admissions Project

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health

B


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

Profile at Department of Scoiology

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.

Professional Website

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.

Profile at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
3D Visualizer for ASPECT project

Heather Bischel

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Focus: Sustainable water treatment technologies and systems to protect water resources.

Profile at Department of Engineering

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

Profile at Department of Economics

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.”

Profile at Department of English

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.

Profile at Department of Political Science
DataLab Researcher Spotlight

Catherine Brinkley

Associate Professor of Human Ecology – Community and Regional Development

Research Focus: Citizen engagement in local planning and mapping community food systems

Profile at Department of Human Ecology

Beth Broome

Senior Advisor to the Provost

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.

Profile at UC Davis

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.

Profile at UC Davis VetMed
Lab for Data Intensive Biology

C


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.

Professional Website

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.

Profile at School of Health

Mary Christopher

Professor Emeritus, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology

Research Focus: Microbial pathogenesis and infectious diseases.

Profile at School of Veterinary Medicine

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.

Professional Website
DataLab Researcher Spotlight

Kari Cooper

Professor of Geology

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.

Profile at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

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

Profile at Department of Physics

Robert Cudmore

Assistant Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology, School of Medicine

Research Focus: Understanding neuronal and vascular function

Profile at UC Davis Health

D


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.

Profile at College of Letters and Science IT

Jesus A. De Loera

Professor of Mathematics

Research Focus: His research interests include discrete mathematics, optimization, computational geometry, algebraic combinatorics, and applications in the mathematical sciences.

Profile at College of Mathematics

Sonja Dieterich

Associate Professor of Radiology

Research Focus: Radiology, cancer treatment technology, and medical imaging

Profile at UC Davis Health

Paul Dodd

Associate Vice Chancellor for Interdisciplinary Research and Strategic Initiatives, Office of Research

Research Focus: Nanoscale materials science and applied physics

Profile at Office of Research

Melanie Dove

Assistant Adjunct Professor of Public Health

Research Focus: Public health with an emphasis on health behavior and community health.

Profile at UCD School of Health

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health

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

Profile at Department of Anthropology

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

Profile at College of Biological Sciences

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.

Profile at College of Education
Professional Website
DataLab Researcher Spotlight
DataLab Marine Protected Area Usage Analysis Project

F


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.

Profile at Department of Biomedical Engineering

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

Profile at Department of Sociology

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

Profile at Department of Psychology

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.

Profile at Department of Computer Science

Ryan Finnigan

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Research Focus: Macro- and meso-level economic, demographic, and institutional changes influence poverty and inequality

Profile at Center for 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

Profile at BicyclingPlus
DataLab Micromobility Research Project

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.

Andrew’s Department Profile
Python User Group

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.

Profile at Department of Communication
Computation Social Science Program

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.

Profile at Department of NPB

G


Mark Goldman

Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior

Research Focus: Computational neuroscience, neural circuits, and mechanisms of memory and decision-making.

Profile at Goldman Lab

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.

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health
DataLab Detecting Liver Cancer Project

John Paul Graff

Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Research Focus: Hematopathology including lymphoma, leukemia, and non-neopastic hematologic processes

Profile at UC Davis Health

Claire Graves

Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health

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

Profile at Department of Philosophy

Laura Grindstaff

Associate Professor of Sociology

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.

Profile at Department of Sociology

Rafi Grosglik

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Research Focus: Global food systems, sociology of culture, and sustainable agriculture

Profile at BGU

H


Fumika Hamada

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology

Research Focus: Investigating neural circuit mechanisms underlying behavior and how these circuits respond to environmental changes.

Profile at Department of Neurobiology

Christoph Hanssmann

Assistant Professor Chair of FTR Designated Emphasis, Gender Studies

Research Focus: The politics of health, science and medicine, focusing on relationships between biomedicine and social movements.

Profile at Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Jon Herman

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Focus: Water resources planning and management

Profile at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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.

Profile at Department of Sociology

Leah Hibel

Professor of Human Ecology; Program Director for Human Development

Research Focus: Developmental psychology and sociological perspectives on childhood development and well-being.

Profile at Department of Human Ecology

Martin Hilbert

Associate Professor of Communication

Research Focus: Role of information, communication, and knowledge in the development of complex social systems

Profile at Department of Communication
DataLab Researcher Spotlight

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.

Profile at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Ocean Climate Lab
DataLab Ocean Acidification Project

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

Profile at Department of Environmental Science and Policy

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

Profile at UC Davis Health

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

Professional Website

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

Profile at Department of Political Science

Lorraine Hwang

Academic Coordinator for CIG, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Research Focus: Geochemistry and planetary geology, with a focus on planetary materials.

Profile at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

J


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

Profile at Department of Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources

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.

Profile at One Health Institute

K


Kevin Keenan

Assistant Clinical Professor of Neurology

Profile at UC Davis Health

Stefan Keller

Associate Professor of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology

Research Focus: Combining histopathology and high-throughput methods to understand and diagnose lymphoproliferative diseases

Profile at UC Davis Veterinary Medicine

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

Professional Website

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.

Profile at Department of Computer Science

Matthias Köppe

Professor of Mathematics

Research Focus: Mathematical optimization (integer programming) and computational discrete mathematics

Professional Website

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.

Profile at Department of Sociology
DataLab Creativity Research Project

L


Gregory Lanzaro

Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology

Research Focus: Vector biology and genetics, focusing on mosquito populations that transmit malaria and other diseases.

Profile at UC Davis Department of Veterinary Medicine

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.

Professional Website

Pamela Lein

Professor of Neurotoxicology

Research Focus: Neurotoxicology, environmental impacts on brain health, and neurodevelopment

Profile at Environmental Health

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.

Profile at Department of Nutrition

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

Profile at Department of Cinema and Digital Media

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

Profile at Department of Human Ecology

Thomas Loehfelm

Associate Professor of Radiology

Research Focus: Medical imaging and radiology, with a focus on diagnostic imaging techniques and clinical applications.

Profile at UC Davis

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

Profile at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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.

Professional Website

M


David Maggs

Professor Emeritus of Surgical and Radiological Sciences

Research Focus: Surface occular disease especially feline herpesvirus and tearfilm dysfunction.

Profile at the School of Veterinary Medicine

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 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.

Profile at the School of Biomedical Engineering

Beatriz Martinez-Lopez

Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology

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.

Profile at the School of Veterinary Medicine
Bioportal website
DataLab Disease Bioportal Research Project

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.

Profile at the School of Veterinary Medicine
Grand Challenges website
DataLab GC Research Project

David McCourt

Associate Professor of Sociology

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..

Profile at Department of Sociology

Joshua McCoy

Associate Professor of Computer Science; Cinema and Digital Media

Research Focus: Artificial intelligence in gaming, interactive narrative design, and game studies.

Profile at School of Engineering

Sarah Rebolloso McCullough

Associate Director, Feminist Research Institute

Research Focus: science and technology studies, mobility justice, data equity

Dr. McCullough supports DataLab’s Data Feminism community of practice.

Profile at FRI
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.

Profile at Science and Technology Studies
Data Feminism Community of Practice
DataLab Researcher Spotlight

Oanh Meyer

Assistant Professor of Neurology

Research Focus: Alzheimer’s disease, social determinants of cognitive health, dementia caregiving in diverse communities

Profile at School of Health

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

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.

Profile at Department Education
DataLab Marine Protected Area Usage Analysis Project

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

Professor Middleton has collaborated with DataLab on cartography and spatial analyses for environmental justice research projects.

Profile at Department of NAS

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.”

Profile at Department of English
UC Davis ModLab

Lihong Mo

Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology

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.

UC Davis Maternal Fetal Medicine

Stephanie Mudge

Associate Professor of Sociology

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.

Profile at Department of Sociology
DataLab Strategy and Democracy Project

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

VP Murali served on DataLab’s advisory group.

Profile at IET

P


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

Profile at UC Davis Health

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

Professional Website

Richard Plant

Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering

Research Focus: Plant science, agricultural engineering, and crop modeling

Profile at BAE

Lisa Pruitt

Distinguished Professor of Law

Research Focus: Rural law and policy, particularly the legal challenges faced by rural communities.

Profile at UCD School of Law

Q


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

Quon Lab Website

R


Bala Rajaratnam

Professor of Statistics

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.

Profile at Department of Statistics

Barbara Ratschbacher

Assistant Professor of Geology

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.

Profile at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Arman Rezaee

Assistant Professor of Economics

Research Focus: Intersections of service delivery, political economy and technology

Profile at Department of Economics

Jason Rogers

Clinical Professor of Cardiology, Director of Interventional Cardiology and Structural Heart Fellowship Programs

Profile at UC Davis Health

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).

Profile at Department of Physics and Astronomy

Ron Runnebaum

Associate Professor of Viticulture and Enology (Chemical Engineer)

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.

Profile at Department of Viticulture and Enology
DataLab Wine Chemistry Project
DataLab Vineyard Research Cartography Project

Katheryn (Kadee) Russ

Assistant Professor of Economics

Research Focus: Labor economics and the economics of education, particularly in understanding labor market dynamics.

Profile at Department of Economics

S


Junichiro Sageshima

Transplant Center Research Scientist

Research Focus: Immunology related to organ transplantation and tolerance mechanisms.

Profile at UC Davis Health


Naoki Saito

Professor of Mathematics

Research Focus: applied and computational harmonic analysis

Professor Saito serves on DataLab’s faculty advisory group.

Profile at Department of Environmental Science and Policy

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

Profile at Department of Environmental Science and Policy

John Scott

Professor of Political Science

Research Focus: History of political philosophy, with a specialization in early modern political thought

Profile at Department of Political Science

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.

Professor Scott collaborated with DataLab on a text mining bibliography project exploring citations in public policy.

Profile at DESP
DataLab Bibliographic Approach to the Role of Science in Policy Making Project

James Sharpnack

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Research Focus: Computationally efficient statistical methodology for understanding complex phenomena in large datasets

Profile at Department of Statistics

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.

Profile at Department of Sociology

Ashish Shenoy

Associate Professor of Agricultural & Resource Economics

Research Focus: Development economics with a focus on migration, labor markets, agricultural productivity, and policy implementation.

Profile at Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics

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

Profile at Department of Sociology
Book: Knowledge Discovery in the Social Sciences

Uma Sirvastava

Director of Arrhythmia Services, Internal Medicine

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.

Profile at UC Davis Health
News: DataLab Faculty Affiliates Receive NIH Grant

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

Profile at Department of EPS

Sam Sandoval Solis

Professor of Land, Air and Water Resources, Cooperative Extension Specialist in Water Management

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.

Profile at Department of LAWR
DataLab wateReview Project

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.

Professional Website

T

Sandra Taylor

Principal Statistician, Clinical and Transnational Science Center

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.

CTSC Biostatistics Webpage

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.

Professional Website
Book: XML and Web Technologies for Data Sciences with R
Book: Data Science in R

Travis Tollefson

Professor of Clinical Surgery

Research Focus: Specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, particularly in cleft palate and craniofacial disorders.

Profile at UC Davis Health

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

Professor Tyson was a faculty advisory group member of DataLab’s precursor, the Data Science Initiative.

Tyson Group Website

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Craig Warden

Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior

Research Focus: Identifying genes that promote accumulation of body fat; studying humans, mice, and C. elegans.

Profile at Department of Biology

Tobias Warner

Associate Professor of French and Italian

Research Focus: African literature, translation studies, and the intersections of literature, language, and politics

Profile at Department of French and Italian

Sarah Wescott

Associate Professor of Cardiology

Research Focus: Cardiac imaging, cardiac arrhythmias, and diagnostic procedures for heart health

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Jiayi Young

Assistant Professor of Design

Research Focus: Public-engaged data-driven large-scale installations and social interventions

Profile at Department of Design

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

Profile at Department of Computer Science