For Mentors:

2025 Michigan Data Science Fellows Program

In this Section

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

NameTitlePrimary Department:Tagline:
Arun AgrawalProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityThe politics of international development, and environmental conservation, institutional change
Raed Al KontarAssistant ProfessorIndustrial and Operations Engineering, College of EngineeringSmart and connected products and systems
Fadhl AlakwaaAssistant Research Scientist Internal Medicine, Michigan Medicine Machine learning, personalized medicine, predictive modeling
Jacob AllgeierAssociate ProfessorEcology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Literature Science and the ArtsThe mechanisms by which behavioral, population, and community dynamics mediate nutrient and energy pathways
Camille AvestruzAssistant ProfessorPhysics, College of Literature Science and the ArtsEvolution of galaxy clusters, machine learning in cosmology
Veera BaladandayuthapaniProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthHigh-dimensional modeling and Bayesian inference
David BrangAssociate ProfessorPsychology, College of Literature Science and the ArtsMultisensory, electrophysiology, machine learning, neuro-oncology, neuroscience
Christopher BrooksAssociate ProfessorSchool of Information
Director, Learning Analytics and Research in the Office of Digital Education & Innovation
Visualizing the interaction between learners and learning technology
Ceren BudakAssociate ProfessorSchool of InformationComputational social science
Bilal ButtAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityAgritech, Big Data, Environmental Social Sciences
Dallas CardAssistant ProfessorSchool of InformationNatural language processing, and computational social science, machine learning
Neil CarterAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityChallenging local to global wildlife conservation issues in the Anthropocene
Tim CernakAssociate ProfessorMedicinal Chemistry, College of Pharmacy
Chemistry, LSA
Graduate Program in Chemical Biology
Computational design of chemical reactions and synthesis
Joyce ChaiProfessorComputer Science and Engineering, College of EngineeringArtificial Intelligence, Natural language processing, situated communication
Sriram ChandrasekaranAssociate ProfessorBiomedical Engineering, College of EngineeringComputer models of protein networks
Yang ChenAssistant ProfessorStatistics, College of Literature Science and the ArtsStatistical inference and applied statistics in biology and astronomy
Thomas L. ChenevertProfessorRadiology, Michigan MedicineLongitudinal Image Registration, Oncologic MR Imaging, Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers, Tumor Volume Segmentation
Lia CorralesAssistant ProfessorAstronomy, College of Literature Science and the ArtsStatistical techniques for studying astrophysical aerosols in the X-ray and UV
Walter DempseyAssociate Professor of Biostatistics, Associate Research Professor at the Institute of Social ResearchBiostatistics, School of Public HealthMobile Health, Network Science, Statistical Methods
Paramveer DhillonAssistant ProfessorSchool of InformationComputational social science, Natural language processing, Statistical Machine Learning, and Field/Digital Experiments
Ivo D. DinovProfessorComputational Medicine, Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine; Human Behavior and Biological Sciences, Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society (MIDAS), Henry Philip Tappan Collegiate ProfessorMathematical modeling, statistical analysis and data visualization
Anne DraelosAssistant ProfessorBiomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Michigan MedicineUnderstanding computation in large-scale neural circuits
Marisa EisenbergProfessorSchool of Public HealthMathematical modeling of disease mechanisms, and intervention design, forecasting
Jeff FesslerProfessorElectric Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering; Radiology, Michigan MedicineLarge-scale inverse problems in image reconstruction
Lana GarmireAssociate ProfessorComputational medicine and bioinformatics, Michigan MedicineData science for actionable transformation of human health from the bench to bedside
Benjamin GoldsteinAssistant ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityData analytics for urban sustainability.
Andrew GronewoldAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityQuantifying and communicating uncertainties arising within long-term hydrological monitoring networks and data
Anhong GuoAssistant ProfessorElectrical 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 HeProfessorLaboratory Animal Medicine and Veterinarian, Michigan MedicineVaccine Informatics, Kidney Precision Medicine, Ontology and Semantic Web
Libby HemphillResearch Associate ProfessorSchool of InformationDigital data, justice, social media
Wei HuAssistant ProfessorComputer Science and EngineeringDeep Learning, Representation Learning, machine learning, optimization, theory
Xianglei HuangProfessorClimate and Space Sciences and EngineeringClimate diagnostics, data modeling, optimization, remote sensing, time-series analysis
Meha JainAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityAgriculture, machine learning, remote sensing, sustainability
Jian KangAssociate ProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthBayesian 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 KellerProfessor of Urology and PathologyUrology, Michigan MedicineSingle cell and spatiotemporal analyses of healthy and diseased tissues
Tom KerppolaProfessorBiological ChemistryBioinformatics in drug development for autoimmune diseases
Nicholas KotovProfessorChemical Sciences and Engineering, College of EngineeringBiomimetic Nanostructures
Amanda KowalskiGail Wilensky Professor of Applied Economics and Public PolicyEconomicsHealth economics and applied econometrics, maternal health, health equity, Covid vaccine
Arpan KusariAssistant Research ScientistAssistant Research Scientist, University of Michigan Transportation Research InstituteLiDAR, Reinforcement Learning, autonomous vehicles, realistic simulation, uncertainty estimation
Elizaveta LevinaVijay Nair Collegiate ProfessorStatistics, College of Literature Science and the ArtsStatistical inference on realistic models for network
Gen LiAssociate ProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthData Integration, Dimension Reduction, Microbiome Research, Parsimonious Models, graphical models, predictive modeling
Max LiAssistant ProfessorAerospace Engineering, Industrial Operations Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of EngineeringAir transportation; Air traffic management; Machine learning and optimization
Yi LiProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public Health
Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center
Statistical methods for kidney epidemiology
Jie LiuAssociate ProfessorComputational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan MedicineMachine learning and computational genomics
Zhongming LiuAssociate ProfessorBiomedical Engineering, College of EngineeringComputational and cognitive neuroscience, deep neural networks
Sabine Loos Assistant ProfessorCivil and Environmental Engineering, College of EngineeringData and user-driven approaches on disasters and equity
Wei LuProfessorMechanical Engineering, College of EngineeringIntegrating human knowledge into machine learning
Qiaozhu MeiProfessorSchool of Information
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering
Information retrieval and text mining
Briana MezukAssociate Chair and Associate Professor, EpidemiologyEpidemiology, School of Public HealthDepression, epidemiology, integrative lifespan, suicide aging
Nambi NallasamyAssistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and Assistant Professor of Computational Medicine and BioinformaticsOphthalmology and Visual Sciences, Michigan MedicineMachine learning algorithms for the enhancement of outcomes in cataract surgery
Joshua P NewellProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityGeographic information systems, gis, remote sensing, resource flow analysis, sustainability, urban systems
Mohammed OmbadiAssistant ProfessorClimate and Space Sciences and EngineeringImpact of climate change on the hydrologic cycle using advanced data analytics
Samet OymakAssistant ProfessorElectrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of EngineeringDecision-making, efficient and robust ML, learning and optimization theory
Bruce Allan PalfeyAssociate Professor & Associate Director of Academic Programs, Chemical Biology Program, Life Sciences InstituteBiological Chemistry, Michigan MedicineMechanisms of flavin-containing enzymes of pyrimidine metabolism, dihydroorotate dehydrogenases, dihydrouridyl-tRNA synthases, thymidylate synthases
Yulin PanAssistant ProfessorNaval Architecture and Marine Engineering, College of EngineeringData assimilation, fluid mechanics, physical oceanography
Vitaliy PopovAssistant ProfessorLearning Health Sciences, Michigan MedicineClinical simulations, learning analytics, multimodal
Emily Mower Provost ProfessorComputer Science, Computer Engineering, College of EngineeringProvost Emotion modeling and assistive technology
Qing QuAssistant ProfessorElectrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of EngineeringDeep Learning, Inverse Problems, Nonconvex Optimization, Representation Learning
Majdi RadaidehAssistant ProfessorNuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, College of EngineeringAutonomous Control, Nuclear Reactor Design, Physics-informed Machine Learning, Uncertainty quantification, optimization
Arvind RaoProfessorComputational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Radiation Oncology, Michigan Medicine; Biomedical Engineering, College of EngineeringMulti-modal decision algorithms that integrate clinical measurements
Daniel RomeroAssociate ProfessorInformation, School of Information; Complex Systems, College of Literature Science and the Arts; Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of EngineeringEmpirical and theoretical analysis of social and information networks
Perry SamsonProfessorClimate and Space Science, College of Engineering; School of InformationRelationships between student performance and behaviors
Maureen SartorProfessorComputational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan MedicineBioinformatics, biomarkers, cancer, classification, epigenomics, integrative omics, prediction, regulatory genomics
Xu ShiAssociate ProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthEHR data, causal inference
Yajuan SiResearch Assistant ProfessorSurvey Research Center, Institute for Social ResearchBayesian, confidentiality protection, missing data, statistics, survey
Peter SongProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthData Integration, distributed inference, machine learning
Wencong SuProfessorElectrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of EngineeringEfficient management of a large number of devices through distributed intelligence
Vijay SubramanianProfessorElectrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of EngineeringStochastic 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 TeplitskiyAssistant ProfessorSchool of InformationComputational methods, experimental methods, science of science
Ivy F. TsoAssociate Professor of Psychiatry, Adjunct Associate Professor of PsychologyPsychiatryPsychiatric disorders, brain network, computational and predictive models
V. G. Vinod VydiswaranAssociate ProfessorLearning Health Sciences, Michigan Medicine; School of InformationText mining, NLP, and ML for extracting relevant information from health-related text corpora
Venkat ViswanathanAssociate ProfessorAerospace Engineering, College of EngineeringProgramming languages, formal methods, software engineering, and artificial intelligence
Feige WangAssistant Research ScientistAstronomy, College of Literature Science and the ArtsBig Data, Machine Learning, Statistical Techniques for Extragalactic Astronomy, Data Mining for LSST, Euclid, and Roman
Lu WangAssociate ProfessorComputer Science and Engineering
Yixin WangAssistant ProfessorStatistics, College of Literature Science and the ArtsLarge-scale probabilistic machine learning, causal inference, machine learning for science
Joshua WelchAssociate ProfessorComputational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Michigan MedicineMachine learning for representing molecular cell states
Zhenke WuAssociate ProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthStatistical methods for precision medicine
Ming XuAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and Sustainability; Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of EngineeringComputational and data-enabled methodology for sustainability
Jinyi YangAssistant ProfessorAstronomyData mining, Machine learning, Extragalactic astrophysics
Qiong Yang
Associate ProfessorBiophysics,College of Literature Science and the Arts; Bioinformatics, Cell and Development Biology, and Cellular and Molecular Biology, Michigan MedicineBiophysics of Living Systems, Quantitative Systems/Synthetic Biology
Bing YeProfessorLife Sciences InstituteNeural basis for decision accuracy
Lei YingProfessorElectrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of EngineeringThe interplay of complex stochastic systems and big-data
Yang ZhangProfessorNuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, Robotics, Applied Physics Program, College of EngineeringFar-from-equilibrium physics, extreme robots, liquid state physics, long timescale phenomena, neutron scattering, rare events, soft robots, statistical mechanics, swarm robots
Xiang ZhouProfessorBiostatistics, School of Public HealthStatistical and computational methods for genetic and genomic studies
Kai ZhuAssociate ProfessorSchool for Environment and SustainabilityGlobal change biology, ecological modeling, and environmental data science
Paul ZimmermanProfessorChemistry, College of Literature Science and the ArtsComputational chemical reaction discovery