Topic “Faculty”

Xinghua (Mindy) Shi is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Before joining UNC Charlotte in January 2013, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, a NIH T32 genetics training fellow at Harvard Medical school, a visiting research fellow in the Medical and Population Genetics program at Broad Institute, and an associate in the Quantitative Genetics Program at Harvard School of Public Health. She has received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Chicago, and M.Eng and B. Eng degrees in Computer Science from Beijing Institute of Technology, China. Her research interest is in computational systems biology, particularly, the design and development of tools and algorithms to solve large-scale computational problems in biology and biomedical research. She is currently focused on integrating large-scale "-omics" datasets to study how genetic architecture affects biological processes and complex phenotypes at the systems level. She is also interested in analyzing complex networks including computer networks, biological networks, and social networks.

Mary Lou Maher, Ph.D., most recently a Senior Research Scientist in the iSchool at the University of Maryland and Honorary Professor of Design Computing in the Design Lab at the University of Sydney, is joining the College of Computing and Informatics as the Chair of the Department of Software and Information Systems. Mary Lou completed a BSc at Columbia University in 1979, and a MS and Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, completing the Ph.D. in 1984. As the Professor of Design Computing at the University of Sydney she was co-Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and she established a new degree program: the Bachelor of Design Computing. While at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006-2010, she was Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division and a Program Director. At NSF, she established the CreativeIT program and helped manage the Human Centered Computing, Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation, Design Science, and Social-Computational Systems Programs. While at the University of Maryland, she developed collaborative projects on crowdsourcing design for citizen science and introduced design thinking to graduate projects in information management.

Yaorong Ge, Ph,D., comes to the Department of Software and Information Systems as a tenured Associate Professor after serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center of Biomedical Informatics at Wake Forest University Health Sciences (WFUHS). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science-Medical Engineering from Vanderbilt University (1995). Dr. Ge has extensive experience in imaging informatics and medical informatics. He was a part of the virtual colonoscopy research group that initiated and advanced the development of virtual colonoscopy, a minimally invasive technology for colorectal cancer screening. His expertise in imaging includes image registration, segmentation, skeletonization, computer-aided diagnosis, and radiology structured reporting. Dr. Ge also has strong experience in industry-strength software development. He co-founded and managed a medical software company to commercialize virtual colonoscopy and radiology structured reporting technologies. As Chief Technology Officer of the company, he established rigorous software engineering processes and a strong engineering team that produced state-of-the-art, FDA cleared imaging information systems, as well as a clinical ontology for radiology reporting. After the startup was acquired by IDX Corporation, an industry leader in healthcare IT before being merged into GE Healthcare, he became the Director of the software development team of IDX’s radiology information system division. Since returning to academia in mid 2006, Dr. Ge has been focusing on imaging informatics research and ontology-based informatics systems development, which includes research ontologies, data grids, and data discovery and mining algorithms. To this end, he has developed an information management system for population-based cardiovascular studies, building on state-of-the-art open source technologies. This system has been successfully deployed in the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) Reading Center, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study Reading Center, and several other research studies at WFUHS to manage imaging results of both human and primate populations. He is also led the development of the WFUHS Translational Data Warehouse (TDW) based on the i2b2 open source technologies. The current version of TDW is hosting de-identified clinical data of more than 1.7 million patients including their demographics, vitals, diagnoses, procedures, labs, and medication. In a recently funded ARRA Grand Opportunity grant, Dr. Ge led the development of a novel technology for effective sharing of clinical medical imaging data among rural and urban healthcare providers. This project investigates both the patient and provider needs for medical image sharing and the technologies that can effectively meet these needs.