Meha Jain

Meha Jain

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​I am an Assistant Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and am part of the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. My research examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and how farmers may adapt to reduce negative impacts. I also examine ways that we can sustainably enhance agricultural production. To do this work, I combine remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and agricultural production across large spatial and temporal scales.

Conducting wheat crop cuts to measure yield in India, which we use to train algorithms that map yield using satellite data

Amie Gordon

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My research focuses on understanding the social cognitive, affective, and biological factors that shape our closest relationships. I am particularly interested in identifying factors that help romantic couples and families maintain high quality relationships. My work draws upon a variety of methods, including experimental, observational, naturalistic (e.g., daily experience), and physiological, to capture people at multiple levels in a variety of social situations. I frequently gather dyadic longitudinal data in order to understand how relationship partners influence each other in the moment and over time.

J.J. Prescott

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Broadly, I study legal decision making, including decisions related to crime and employment. I typically use large social science data bases, but also collect my own data using technology or surveys.

Elle O'Brien

Elle O’Brien

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My research focuses on building infrastructure for public health and health science research organizations to take advantage of cloud computing, strong software engineering practices, and MLOps (machine learning operations). By equipping biomedical research groups with tools that facilitate automation, better documentation, and portable code, we can improve the reproducibility and rigor of science while scaling up the kind of data collection and analysis possible.

Research topics include:
1. Open source software and cloud infrastructure for research,
2. Software development practices and conventions that work for academic units, like labs or research centers, and
3. The organizational factors that encourage best practices in reproducibility, data management, and transparency

The practice of science is a tug of war between competing incentives: the drive to do a lot fast, and the need to generate reproducible work. As data grows in size, code increases in complexity and the number of collaborators and institutions involved goes up, it becomes harder to preserve all the “artifacts” needed to understand and recreate your own work. Technical AND cultural solutions will be needed to keep data-centric research rigorous, shareable, and transparent to the broader scientific community.

View MIDAS Faculty Research Pitch, Fall 2021

 

Ben Green

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Ben studies the social and political impacts of government algorithms. This work falls into several categories. First, evaluating how people make decisions in collaboration with algorithms. This work involves developing machine learning algorithms and studying how people use them in public sector prediction and decision settings. Second, studying the ethical and political implications of government algorithms. Much of this work draws on STS and legal theory to interrogate topics such as algorithmic fairness, smart cities, and criminal justice risk assessments. Third, developing algorithms for public sector applications. In addition to academic research, Ben spent a year developing data analytics tools as a data scientist for the City of Boston.

Allison Earl

Allison Earl

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My primary research interests are understanding the causes and consequences of biased selection and attention to persuasive information, particularly in the context of health promotion. Simply stated, I am interested in what we pay attention to and why, and how this attention (or inattention) influences attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, such as persuasion and healthy behavior. In particular, my work has addressed disparities in attention to information about HIV prevention for African-Americans compared to European-Americans as a predictor of disparities in health outcomes. I am also exploring barriers to attention to health information by African-Americans, including the roles of stigma, shame, fear, and perceptions of irrelevance. At a more basic attitudes and persuasion level, I am currently pursuing work relevant to how we select information for liked versus disliked others, and how the role of choice influences how we process information we agree versus disagree with.

Sardar Ansari

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I build data science tools to address challenges in medicine and clinical care. Specifically, I apply signal processing, image processing and machine learning techniques, including deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks and natural language processing, to aid diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of patients with acute and chronic conditions. In addition, I conduct research on novel approaches to represent clinical data and combine supervised and unsupervised methods to improve model performance and reduce the labeling burden. Another active area of my research is design, implementation and utilization of novel wearable devices for non-invasive patient monitoring in hospital and at home. This includes integration of the information that is measured by wearables with the data available in the electronic health records, including medical codes, waveforms and images, among others. Another area of my research involves linear, non-linear and discrete optimization and queuing theory to build new solutions for healthcare logistic planning, including stochastic approximation methods to model complex systems such as dispatch policies for emergency systems with multi-server dispatches, variable server load, multiple priority levels, etc.

Daniel P. Keating

Daniel P. Keating

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The primary tools currently in use are variations of linear models (regression, MLM, SEM, and so on) as we pursue the initial aims of the NICHD funded work. We are expanding into new areas that require new tools. Our adolescent sample is diverse, selected through quota sampling of high schools close enough to UM to afford the use of neuroimaging tools, but it is not population representative. To overcome this, we have begun work to calibrate our sample with the nationally representative Monitoring the Future study, implementing pseudo-weighting and multilevel regression and post-stratification. To enable much more powerful analyses, we are aiming toward the harmonization of multiple, high quality longitudinal databases from adolescence through early adulthood. This would benefit traditional analyses by allowing cross-validation with high power, but also provide opportunities for newer data science tools such as computational modeling and machine learning approaches.

Anne Fernandez

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Dr. Fernandez is a clinical psychologist with extensive training in both addiction and behavioral medicine. She is the Clinical Program Director at the University of Michigan Addiction Treatment Service. Her research focuses on the intersection of addiction and health across two main themes: 1) Expanding access to substance use disorder treatment and prevention services particularly in healthcare settings and; 2) applying precision health approaches to addiction-related healthcare questions. Her current grant-funded research includes an NIH-funded randomized controlled pilot trial of a preoperative alcohol intervention, an NIH-funded precision health study to leverage electronic health records to identify high-risk alcohol use at the time of surgery using natural language processing and other machine-learning based approaches, a University of Michigan funded precision health award to understand and prevent new persistent opioid use after surgery using prediction modeling, and a federally-funded evaluation of the state of Michigan’s substance use disorder treatment expansion.

Michael Rubyan

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My research focuses on the development and evaluation of novel interventions that leverage emerging technologies to train members of the healthcare workforce around adhering to guidelines. I study how to scale custom designed teaching and learning platforms and evaluate their use to motivate effective communication and dissemination of evidence based practice. Other emphases of my work include health policy literacy, translation and communication of health services research, and improving health system literacy in urban communities. I have developed and evaluated numerous web based educational interventions that employ the “flipped classroom” design with an emphasis on understanding the data and analytics that guide successful implementation and promote high fidelity for members of the healthcare workforce. As an implementation scientist, I rely on the integration of data and analytics to understand what motivates successful program implementation.

In addition to the development of these platforms, I have extensive experience developing and evaluating online, hybrid residential, residential courses, and MOOCs related to healthcare management, non-profit management, healthcare finance, and health economics that employ engaging lessons and modules, interactive graphics, and a blended learning format to aid health professions students, and both undergraduate and graduate public health students in understanding the healthcare system. My MOOC entitled “Understanding and Improving the U.S. Health Care System” has been taken by over 5,000 learners and is characterized by the use of “big data” to understand how future healthcare providers learn health policy.