Faculty Mentors
Each Fellow must have at least one U-M faculty member as the primary mentor at the time of the application (the list of participating faculty will be posted by Sept. 1, and will keep being updated). A second mentor with complementary expertise is required when the Fellow starts in the program. If needed, the primary mentor can help identify a suitable second mentor. Working together with MIDAS, the mentors will provide career guidance to the Fellows, meet with them regularly to assess research progress, help the Fellows seek opportunities for career advancement, and participate in activities that strengthen the Fellows community and the U-M data science and AI community.
While all faculty members in research domains within the scope of this program are eligible to be mentors, not all have funding or bandwidth to accept new postdocs. In order to help postdoc applicants connect with potential mentors, we maintain a list of faculty members who have opted in this program. If you would like to opt in, please sign up with this form. Please note that faculty members who are not on this list can still be mentors. Being on the list simply makes it easier for applicants to find you.
For the sake of the program’s scientific diversity, faculty mentors of the current Fellows are discouraged to be mentors of new applicants.
Expectations
- Cost share: Faculty mentors and MIDAS will provide 50:50 cost share to cover the postdoc’s salary and benefits.
- Salary: Commensurate to norms in each research field, funded jointly by MIDAS and faculty mentors. Faculty mentors will work with MIDAS to determine the exact salary.
- Office space: Fellows are expected to conduct their work on U-M’s Ann Arbor Campus. They will be expected to spend at least 50% of time at MIDAS so that they can be part of the data science and AI postdoc network and enhance the interdisciplinary reach of MIDAS.
- Professional service: The Fellows will be expected to spend 10% of their effort on MIDAS programs that strengthen MIDAS’s core pillars. Based on their career plans, they can choose to be involved in activities such as developing tools for research, training and mentoring, and data science projects for positive societal impact. They will also be expected to interact with the U-M data science and AI community through research presentations and other events.
- Selection process: A faculty review committee will select the top candidates. MIDAS will consult with their faculty mentors to determine the salary, then notify the candidates.
How to Participate
- MIDAS faculty members can sign up to participate in this program, with the understanding that, if their applicant is selected, their portion of the funding needs to be in place before the Fellows start at U-M. You do not need to tell us what the source of funding will be until it is time to make offers. The only constraint is that the funding should not require substantial non-research time commitment from the fellow, such as teaching a course.
- Anyone who is currently not a MIDAS affiliate faculty member will need to join before they can be placed on the participating faculty list.
- Any faculty member who is not on the participating faculty list may still submit an application with a candidate. Not being listed simply means that it is very unlikely you will receive inquiries from potential applicants.
Interested Data Science Mentors
| Name | Title | Primary Department: | Tagline: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arun Agrawal | Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | The politics of international development, and environmental conservation, institutional change |
| Raed Al Kontar | Assistant Professor | Industrial and Operations Engineering, College of Engineering | Smart and connected products and systems |
| Fadhl Alakwaa | Assistant Research Scientist | Internal Medicine, Michigan Medicine | Machine learning, personalized medicine, predictive modeling |
| Jacob Allgeier | Associate Professor | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Literature Science and the Arts | The mechanisms by which behavioral, population, and community dynamics mediate nutrient and energy pathways |
| Camille Avestruz | Assistant Professor | Physics, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Evolution of galaxy clusters, machine learning in cosmology |
| Veera Baladandayuthapani | Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | High-dimensional modeling and Bayesian inference |
| David Brang | Associate Professor | Psychology, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Multisensory, electrophysiology, machine learning, neuro-oncology, neuroscience |
| Christopher Brooks | Associate Professor | School of Information Director, Learning Analytics and Research in the Office of Digital Education & Innovation | Visualizing the interaction between learners and learning technology |
| Ceren Budak | Associate Professor | School of Information | Computational social science |
| Bilal Butt | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Agritech, Big Data, Environmental Social Sciences |
| Dallas Card | Assistant Professor | School of Information | Natural language processing, and computational social science, machine learning |
| Neil Carter | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Challenging local to global wildlife conservation issues in the Anthropocene |
| Tim Cernak | Associate Professor | Medicinal Chemistry, College of Pharmacy Chemistry, LSA Graduate Program in Chemical Biology | Computational design of chemical reactions and synthesis |
| Joyce Chai | Professor | Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering | Artificial Intelligence, Natural language processing, situated communication |
| Sriram Chandrasekaran | Associate Professor | Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering | Computer models of protein networks |
| Yang Chen | Assistant Professor | Statistics, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Statistical inference and applied statistics in biology and astronomy |
| Thomas L. Chenevert | Professor | Radiology, Michigan Medicine | Longitudinal Image Registration, Oncologic MR Imaging, Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers, Tumor Volume Segmentation |
| Lia Corrales | Assistant Professor | Astronomy, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Statistical techniques for studying astrophysical aerosols in the X-ray and UV |
| Walter Dempsey | Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Associate Research Professor at the Institute of Social Research | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Mobile Health, Network Science, Statistical Methods |
| Paramveer Dhillon | Assistant Professor | School of Information | Computational social science, Natural language processing, Statistical Machine Learning, and Field/Digital Experiments |
| Ivo D. Dinov | Professor | Computational Medicine, Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine; Human Behavior and Biological Sciences, Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society (MIDAS), Henry Philip Tappan Collegiate Professor | Mathematical modeling, statistical analysis and data visualization |
| Anne Draelos | Assistant Professor | Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Michigan Medicine | Understanding computation in large-scale neural circuits |
| Marisa Eisenberg | Professor | School of Public Health | Mathematical modeling of disease mechanisms, and intervention design, forecasting |
| Jeff Fessler | Professor | Electric Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering; Radiology, Michigan Medicine | Large-scale inverse problems in image reconstruction |
| Lana Garmire | Associate Professor | Computational medicine and bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine | Data science for actionable transformation of human health from the bench to bedside |
| Benjamin Goldstein | Assistant Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Data analytics for urban sustainability. |
| Andrew Gronewold | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Quantifying and communicating uncertainties arising within long-term hydrological monitoring networks and data |
| Anhong Guo | Assistant Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, School of Information | Hybrid human-AI intelligent interactive systems to provide access to visual information in the real world |
| Yongqun Oliver He | Professor | Laboratory Animal Medicine and Veterinarian, Michigan Medicine | Vaccine Informatics, Kidney Precision Medicine, Ontology and Semantic Web |
| Libby Hemphill | Research Associate Professor | School of Information | Digital data, justice, social media |
| Wei Hu | Assistant Professor | Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering | Deep learning theory, large language models, interpretability |
| Xianglei Huang | Professor | Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering | Climate diagnostics, data modeling, optimization, remote sensing, time-series analysis |
| Meha Jain | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Agriculture, machine learning, remote sensing, sustainability |
| Dani Jones | Associate Research Scientist (Research Faculty) | Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR), School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) | Machine learning applied to problems in Great Lakes science: observing system design, water level forecasting, extratropical cyclone impacts |
| Jian Kang | Associate Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Bayesian methods, composite likelihood approach and missing data problems, efficient statistical computation algorithms, graphical models, latent source separation methods, network inference, ultrahigh-dimensional feature selection |
| Evan Keller | Professor of Urology and Pathology | Urology, Michigan Medicine | Single cell and spatiotemporal analyses of healthy and diseased tissues |
| Tom Kerppola | Professor | Biological Chemistry | Bioinformatics in drug development for autoimmune diseases |
| Nicholas Kotov | Professor | Chemical Sciences and Engineering, College of Engineering | Biomimetic Nanostructures |
| Amanda Kowalski | Gail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public Policy | Economics | Health economics and applied econometrics, maternal health, health equity, Covid vaccine |
| Arpan Kusari | Assistant Research Scientist | Assistant Research Scientist, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute | LiDAR, Reinforcement Learning, autonomous vehicles, realistic simulation, uncertainty estimation |
| Elizaveta Levina | Vijay Nair Collegiate Professor | Statistics, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Statistical inference on realistic models for network |
| Gen Li | Associate Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Data Integration, Dimension Reduction, Microbiome Research, Parsimonious Models, graphical models, predictive modeling |
| Max Li | Assistant Professor | Aerospace Engineering, Industrial Operations Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering | Air transportation; Air traffic management; Machine learning and optimization |
| Yi Li | Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center | Statistical methods for kidney epidemiology |
| Jie Liu | Associate Professor | Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine | Machine learning and computational genomics |
| Zhongming Liu | Associate Professor | Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering | Computational and cognitive neuroscience, deep neural networks |
| Sabine Loos | Assistant Professor | Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering | Data and user-driven approaches on disasters and equity |
| Wei Lu | Professor | Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering | Integrating human knowledge into machine learning |
| Qiaozhu Mei | Professor | School of Information Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | Information retrieval and text mining |
| Briana Mezuk | Associate Chair and Associate Professor, Epidemiology | Epidemiology, School of Public Health | Depression, epidemiology, integrative lifespan, suicide aging |
| Nambi Nallasamy | Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and Assistant Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics | Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Michigan Medicine | Machine learning algorithms for the enhancement of outcomes in cataract surgery |
| Joshua P Newell | Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Geographic information systems, gis, remote sensing, resource flow analysis, sustainability, urban systems |
| Mohammed Ombadi | Assistant Professor | Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering | Impact of climate change on the hydrologic cycle using advanced data analytics |
| Gabor Orosz | Professor | Mechanical Engineering | Nonlinear dynamics and control, time delay systems, machine learning, and data-driven systems, connected and automated vehicles, traffic flow |
| Samet Oymak | Assistant Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | Decision-making, efficient and robust ML, learning and optimization theory |
| Bruce Allan Palfey | Associate Professor & Associate Director of Academic Programs, Chemical Biology Program, Life Sciences Institute | Biological Chemistry, Michigan Medicine | Mechanisms of flavin-containing enzymes of pyrimidine metabolism, dihydroorotate dehydrogenases, dihydrouridyl-tRNA synthases, thymidylate synthases |
| Yulin Pan | Assistant Professor | Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, College of Engineering | Data assimilation, fluid mechanics, physical oceanography |
| Vitaliy Popov | Assistant Professor | Learning Health Sciences, Michigan Medicine | Clinical simulations, learning analytics, multimodal |
| Emily Mower Provost | Professor | Computer Science, Computer Engineering, College of Engineering | Provost Emotion modeling and assistive technology |
| Qing Qu | Assistant Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | Deep Learning, Inverse Problems, Nonconvex Optimization, Representation Learning |
| Majdi Radaideh | Assistant Professor | Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, College of Engineering | Autonomous Control, Nuclear Reactor Design, Physics-informed Machine Learning, Uncertainty quantification, optimization |
| Arvind Rao | Professor | Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Radiation Oncology, Michigan Medicine; Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering | Multi-modal decision algorithms that integrate clinical measurements |
| Daniel Romero | Associate Professor | Information, School of Information; Complex Systems, College of Literature Science and the Arts; Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering | Empirical and theoretical analysis of social and information networks |
| Perry Samson | Professor | Climate and Space Science, College of Engineering; School of Information | Relationships between student performance and behaviors |
| Maureen Sartor | Professor | Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine | Bioinformatics, biomarkers, cancer, classification, epigenomics, integrative omics, prediction, regulatory genomics |
| Xu Shi | Associate Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | EHR data, causal inference |
| Yajuan Si | Research Assistant Professor | Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research | Bayesian, confidentiality protection, missing data, statistics, survey |
| Peter Song | Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Data Integration, distributed inference, machine learning |
| Wencong Su | Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | Efficient management of a large number of devices through distributed intelligence |
| Vijay Subramanian | Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | Stochastic modeling, decision and control theory and applications to networks |
| Wenhao Sun | Assistant Professor | Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering | Materials Discovery and Design, Materials Informatics |
| Misha Teplitskiy | Assistant Professor | School of Information | Computational methods, experimental methods, science of science |
| Ivy F. Tso | Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology | Psychiatry | Psychiatric disorders, brain network, computational and predictive models |
| V. G. Vinod Vydiswaran | Associate Professor | Learning Health Sciences, Michigan Medicine; School of Information | Text mining, NLP, and ML for extracting relevant information from health-related text corpora |
| Venkat Viswanathan | Associate Professor | Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering | Programming languages, formal methods, software engineering, and artificial intelligence |
| Feige Wang | Assistant Research Scientist | Astronomy, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Big Data, Machine Learning, Statistical Techniques for Extragalactic Astronomy, Data Mining for LSST, Euclid, and Roman |
| Lu Wang | Associate Professor | Computer Science and Engineering | |
| Yixin Wang | Assistant Professor | Statistics, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Large-scale probabilistic machine learning, causal inference, machine learning for science |
| Joshua Welch | Associate Professor | Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine | Machine learning for representing molecular cell states |
| Zhenke Wu | Associate Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Statistical methods for precision medicine |
| Ming Xu | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability; Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering | Computational and data-enabled methodology for sustainability |
| Jinyi Yang | Assistant Professor | Astronomy | Data mining, Machine learning, Extragalactic astrophysics |
| Qiong Yang | Associate Professor | Biophysics,College of Literature Science and the Arts; Bioinformatics, Cell and Development Biology, and Cellular and Molecular Biology, Michigan Medicine | Biophysics of Living Systems, Quantitative Systems/Synthetic Biology |
| Bing Ye | Professor | Life Sciences Institute | Neural basis for decision accuracy |
| Lei Ying | Professor | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering | The interplay of complex stochastic systems and big-data |
| Yang Zhang | Professor | Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, Robotics, Applied Physics Program, College of Engineering | Far-from-equilibrium physics, extreme robots, liquid state physics, long timescale phenomena, neutron scattering, rare events, soft robots, statistical mechanics, swarm robots |
| Xiang Zhou | Professor | Biostatistics, School of Public Health | Statistical and computational methods for genetic and genomic studies |
| Kai Zhu | Associate Professor | School for Environment and Sustainability | Global change biology, ecological modeling, and environmental data science |
| Paul Zimmerman | Professor | Chemistry, College of Literature Science and the Arts | Computational chemical reaction discovery |