Committee Members

May Dongmei Wang, Georgia Tech. and Emory
Univ., USA

Bio-sketch: Dr. Wang is a Wallace H.
Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow and full professor in
the Departments of Biomedical Eng. and Electrical and
Computer Eng. at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory
University. She received BEng from Tsinghua University
China, and MS/PhD degrees from Georgia Institute of
Technology. Her research is in Biomedical Big Data Analytics
with a focus on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) and
AI for predictive, personalized, and precision health
(pHealth). Dr. Wang published over 260 peer-reviewed
articles in referred journals and conference proceedings and
delivered over 240 invited and keynote lectures. She is a
recipient of Georgia Tech Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award
for Undergraduate Research, and a recipient of Emory
University MilliPub Award (for a high-impact paper that is
cited over 1,000 times). Currently, Dr. Wang is Director of
Biomedical Big Data Initiative, a Kavli Fellow, a Georgia
Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, a Petit Institute
Faculty Fellow, an AIMBE Fellow, an IAMBE Fellow, and a
member of Board of Directors in American Board of AI in
Medicine. She serves as the Senior Editor for IEEE Journal
of Biomedical and Health Informatics, an Associate Editor
for IEEE Transactions for BME and IEEE Reviews for BME, a
permanent panelist for NIH CDMA study section, a NSF Smart
and Connect Health panelist, and a panelist for Brain Canada
and multiple European countries. During 2018-2020, she was
Carol Ann and David Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow of
BME at Georgia Tech. In 2021, she is in Georgia Tech
Provost’s Emerging Leaders Program, and in Executive
Committee of IAMBE. During 2017-2019, she served as Vice
President of IEEE EMBS, AIMBE Nomination Committee Chair,
and Georgia Tech Biomedical Informatics Program Co-Director
in Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute
(ACTSI). During 2015-2016, she was IEEE EMBS Distinguished
Lecturer and an Emerging Area Editor for PNAS.

Ananth Kalyanaraman

Bio-sketch:Ananth Kalyanaraman is a Professor
and Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Science at the School of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State
University in Pullman. He is the Director of the AgAID AI
Institute for transforming workforce and decision support in
agriculture. He serves as the Associate Director for the School
of EECS, and also holds a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (PNNL). He holds affiliate faculty positions
at the Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program and the Paul G.
Allen School for Global Health. Ananth received his bachelors
from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur,
India (B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, 1998); and
subsequently M.S. (Computer Science, 2002) and Ph.D. (Computer
Engineering, 2006) from Iowa State University. Ananth works at
the intersection of parallel computing, graph analytics, and
bioinformatics/computational biology. His focus is on developing
algorithms and software for scalable analysis of large-scale
data from various scientific domains and particularly
agriculture, plant and life sciences. Research in his lab has
been supported by various funding sources including the National
Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Center for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC). Ananth is a recipient of U.S.
Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, and his
student-led research works have received multiple conference
best paper awards and a prestigious graph challenge award.
Ananth serves/has served on the editorial boards of several
reputed journals (including TPDS, TCBB, JPDC, ParCo), and also
regularly serves in various capacities including organizational
capacities at various conferences in the areas of parallel
processing and bioinformatics. He is currently serving as a
Vice-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel
Programming (TCPP). Ananth is a senior member of IEEE, and a
member of ACM and SIAM.

Byung-Jun Yoon

Bio-sketch: Dr. Byung-Jun Yoon received the
B.S.E. (summa cum laude) degree from the Seoul National
University (SNU), Seoul, Korea, in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),
Pasadena, CA, in 2002 and 2007, respectively, all in Electrical
Engineering. In 2008, he joined the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX,
USA, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Yoon also
holds a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory
(BNL), Upton, NY, where he is a Scientist in Computational
Science Initiative (CSI). During October 2014-August 2016, Dr.
Yoon was on a leave of absence from Texas A&M and worked at the
Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar, as one of the
founding faculty members in the College of Science and
Engineering. His recent honors include the National Science
Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the Best Paper Award at the 9th
Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC), the Best Paper
Award at the 12th Annual MCBIOS Conference, and the SLATE
Teaching Excellence Award from the Texas A&M University System.
Dr. Yoon’s main research interests include bioinformatics,
computational network biology, machine learning, and signal
processing.

Yi Pan

Bio-sketch: Dr. Yi Pan was born in Jiangsu,
China. He entered Tsinghua University in March 1978 with the
highest college entrance examination score among all 1977 high
school graduates in Jiangsu Province. Dr. Pan is a Distinguished
University Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer
Science and Professor of the Department of Computer Information
Systems at Georgia State University. Dr. Pan received his B.Eng.
and M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua
University, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and his Ph.D.
degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh,
USA, in 1991. Dr. Pan’s research interests include parallel and
cloud computing, wireless networks, and bioinformatics. Dr. Pan
has published more than 330 papers including over 150 SCI
journal papers and 50 IEEE Transactions papers. In addition, he
has edited/authored 39 books. He has received many awards from
organizations such as IEEE, NSF, AFOSR, JSPS, IBM, ISIBM, IISF
and Mellon Foundation. Dr. Pan has served as an editor-in-chief
or editorial board member for 15 journals including 7 IEEE
Transactions and a guest editor for 12 special issues for 10
journals including 2 IEEE Transactions. He has organized
numerous international conferences and workshops and has
delivered over 40 keynote speeches at international conferences
around the world. Dr. Pan is a “Great Master Face-to-Face”
Series Speaker (2012), an IEEE Distinguished Speaker
(2000-2002), a Yamacraw Distinguished Speaker (2002), a Shell
Oil Colloquium Speaker (2002), and a senior member of IEEE. He
is listed in Men of Achievement, Who’s Who in Midwest, Who’s Who
in America, Who’s Who in American Education, Who’s Who in
Computational Science and Engineering, and Who’s Who of Asian
Americans.

Nurit Haspel

Bio-sketch: Dr. Haspel is an associate
professor and undergraduate program director in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Before that, she was a postdoctoral research associate with the
Physical and Biological Computing Group at Rice University. She
graduated from the Department of Computer Science in Tel Aviv
University, Israel, where she was a member of the structural
bioinformatics group. Dr. Haspel’s research lies in the areas of
computational structural biology and structural bioinformatics.
Her goal is to better understand the structure and flexibility
of proteins, to model conformational changes in proteins, and to
design novel nano-structures which may contribute to the
understanding of the self-assembly properties of proteins and
facilitate experimental nano-design. In her research, Dr. Haspel
focuses on both the development of novel algorithms and the
application of state-of-the-art existing methodologies to
various problems in molecular biology, nanobiology and
biochemistry.

Peter L. Elkin

Bio-sketch: Dr. Elkin serves as Professor and
Chair of the UB Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is also
a Professor of Medicine at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Peter
L. Elkin has served as a tenured Professor of Medicine at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In this capacity he was the
Center Director of Biomedical Informatics, Vice-Chairman of the
Department of Internal Medicine and the Vice-President of Mount
Sinai hospital for Biomedical and Translational Informatics. Dr.
Elkin has published over 120 peer reviewed publications. He
received his Bachelors of Science from Union College and his
M.D. from New York Medical College. He did his Internal Medicine
residency at the Lahey Clinic and his NIH/NLM sponsored
fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and
the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Elkin has been working
in Biomedical Informatics since 1981 and has been actively
researching health data representation since 1987. He is the
primary author of the American National Standards Institute’s
(ANSI) national standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled
Health Vocabularies ASTM E2087, which has also been approved by
ISO TC 215 as a Technical Specification (TS17117). He has
chaired Health and Human Service’s HITSP Technical Committee on
Population Health. Dr. Elkin served as the co-chair of the AHIC
Transition Planning Group. Dr. Elkin is a Master of the American
College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American College of
Medical Informatics. Dr. Elkin chairs the International Medical
Informatics Associations Working Group on Human Factors
Engineering for Health Informatics. Dr. Elkin is the Editor of
the Springer Informatics Textbook, Terminology and
Terminological Systems. He was awarded the Mayo Department of
Medicine’s Laureate Award for 2005. Dr. Elkin is the index
recipient of the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding
contribution to the field of Medical Informatics.

Jake Y. Chen

Bio-sketch: Dr. Jake Y. Chen is the Chief
Bioinformatics Officer at UAB Informatics Institute and a
Professor of Genetics, Computer Science, and Biomedical
Engineering. Previously, he was the founding director of Indiana
Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine. He has
over 25 years of R&D experience in biological data mining and
systems biology, with over 180 peer-reviewed publications. He is
currently President-elect of the Midsouth Computational Biology
and Bioinformatics Society. He is an elected fellow of the
American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American
Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He also
serves on the editorial boards of BMC Bioinformatics, Journal of
American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), and Frontiers
in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. In 2019, he was
recognized by Deep Knowledge Analytics as one of the “Top 100 AI
Leaders in Drug Discovery and Healthcare”.

Sun Kim

Bio-sketch: Sun Kim is a Professor in the
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of the
Bioinformatics Institute, and an affiliated faculty for the
Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics at Seoul National
University. Before joining SNU, he was Chair of Faculty Division
C; Director of Center for Bioinformatics Research, an Associate
Professor in School of Informatics and Computing; and an Adjunct
Associate Professor of Cellular and Integrative Physiology,
Medical Sciences Program at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington.
Prior to joining IU in 2001, he worked at DuPont Central
Research from 1998 to 2001, and at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign from 1997 to 1998. Sun Kim received B.S and M.S
and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Seoul National University,
KAIST, and the University of Iowa, respectively.

Christina Boucher

Bio-sketch: Christina Boucher is an Associate
Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science
and Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research is on
developing algorithms and data structures that allow for
large-scale biological sequence analysis. She incorporates the
latest sequencing technologies and biological analyses into her
work. Two major biological themes recur in her research:
alignment to pan-genomes (usually human) and understanding how
microbial species move and evolve. She is currently a standing
member of the NIH BDMA study section and a Board Member of ACM
SIGBIO.