5th Annual CDSE Days 2019

Associate Professor, Department of Math, University at Buffalo
Bernard Badzioch has research interests in algebraic topology and categorical algebra. He has taught several courses using Python and Jupyter to introduce students to scientific and mathematical computing.

Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University at Vermont
James Bagrow is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Networks Research at Northeastern University and a research assistant professor at Northwestern University. Professor Bagrow received his Ph.D. in Physics from Clarkson University in 2008. He is interested in understanding the underlying rules and organizing principles of complex physical and social systems. His work combines mathematical models with large-scale data analysis to better understand these systems, with a particular emphasis on network science and human dynamics. Other interests include stochastic and nonlinear dynamics, dynamical systems, and novel optimization and machine learning methods.

Principal Scientist, Metrum Research Group
Kyle joined Metrum in 2010 after receiving his Pharm.D. and Ph.D. in  Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology from the University of Minnesota. As a member of our translational and systems pharmacology group, Kyle has worked to support sponsor development programs in a variety of therapeutic areas, including chronic hepatitis C infection, HIV, calcium homeostasis and bone health, type-2 diabetes, and cystic fibrosis.

CEO, SomaDetect
Bethany Deshpande is a highly motivated, big-picture thinker who has more than a decade of experience in science and entrepreneurship, and is always excited to tackle big problems in big ways. Bethany believes that hard work and kindness will always pay off. She insists on asking questions like a scientist, demanding for the precision of a surgeon, and taking risks like an artist. She believes that planning is everything, but understands that the plan is nothing. Bethany is most known for her work with youth at the SHAD summer program, her research in subarctic, permafrost environments, her singing abilities and her adoration of chocolate. Bethany was a Schmeelk Canada Fellow, has won the Leadership and Sustainability Scholarship, and the Student Services Award for Leadership Excellence. Bethany completed a Ph.D. in Biology at Université Laval throughout which she studied microbial activity in northern ecosystems, and gained experience using sensor technology in remote, extreme environments.

Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Director, Artificial Intelligence Institute, University at Buffalo
Prior to coming to UB, Dr. David Doermann was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he developed, selected and oversaw approximately $150 million in research and transition funding in the areas of computer vision, human language technologies and voice analytics.  He coordinated performers on all of the projects, orchestrating consensus, evaluating cross team management and overseeing fluid program objectives.

Assistant Professor, Physics, Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Rochester
Gourab Ghoshal was previously a Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and a member of the multidisciplinary Origins of Life initiative. He got his bachelor's and master's degree in theoretical physics at the University of London, UK and his Ph.D. (also in physics) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Following his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral scientist jointly at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School, as well as a visiting scientist at the Media Lab, MIT. 

Gourab is a Statistical Physicist and works in the field of Complex Systems. His research interests are in the theory and applications of Complex Networks as well as Non-equilibrium Statistical Physics, Game theory, Econophysics, Dynamical Systems and the Origins of Life. His work has been published in Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, and has been covered in the New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Nature News, and MIT Tech Review.

Chief Delivery Officer & Co-Founder, Socially Determined
Jason has over 17 years of experience in the healthcare field, with a strong emphasis on hospital operations, clinical program management, physician enterprise leadership and quality improvement. Jason recently spent 6 years as System Vice President of Cardiovascular Services for Catholic Health and has a broad management consulting background with roles at the Chartis Group, Deloitte, and the Advisory Board Company. In 2016, Jason helped launch Circuit Clinical, an organization focused on bringing clinical research trials into community based practice settings. During the most recent 2 years, Jason helped co-found Socially Determined, where he serves as a Partner focused on project work with hospitals and insurance companies. Socially Determined is an analytics and services platform focused on helping hospitals, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies identify and solve for Social Determinant of Health Barriers in the populations they serve.

Jason has led a number of initiatives focused on bringing care coordination and health education into the community, focusing on patients challenged with chronic disease. He previously served as Board Chair for the American Heart Association, and currently serves as a Board Member at the Southern California University of Health Sciences. He believes that caregivers need to meet the patient where they live and work, and that the silver bullet in healthcare is patient and family navigation. Jason refuses to believe that a career in the NHL is out of reach and attempts to be on the ice a few times each week. Otherwise, he’s hanging out with his two beautiful daughters, ideally outdoors and away from it all.

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo
Kenneth (Kenny) Joseph was previously a postdoc at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and completed his graduate work in the Societal Computing program in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on developing a better understanding of the dynamics and cognitive representations of stereotypes and prejudice, and how these biases are learned and acted upon. Kenny's work has been published in a variety of outlets, including Science, KDD, and the Journal of Mathematical Sociology, and covered by popular press outlets including The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight.

Research Scientist, Metrum Research Group
Tim joined Metrum in March 2017 after completing his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh where his dissertation was focused on modeling and controlling stress-induced hyperglycemia in critically ill patients. This work included dynamic optimization of models describing glucose-insulin dynamics and the development of model-predictive controllers and state estimators for clinical applications. Tim’s interests include the application of systems biology models to guide decision making in the drug development process and to advance treatment paradigms.

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo
Matthew Knepley received his B.S. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. Prior to joining the University at Buffalo, Matt was an Assistant Professor at Computational and Applied Mathematics Department at Rice University. His research focuses on scientific computation, including fast methods, parallel computing, software development, numerical analysis, and multicore architectures. He is an author of the widely used PETSc library for scientific computing from ANL, and is a principal designer of the PetFMM and PetRBF libraries, for the parallel fast multipole method and parallel radial basis function interpolation. Matt was a J.T. Oden Faculty Research Fellow at the Insitute for Computation Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin and was the recipient of both the R&D 100 Award in 2009, and the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering in 2015 as part of the PETSc team.

Vice President, Data Science & Engineering, Sentient Science
In his current role as Vice-President- Data Science & Engineering, Vijayant Kumar and his team are responsible for drivetrain life extension of a 30000+ global fleet of wind turbines through a cloud-based SaaS platform. Dr. Kumar’s team draws upon principles of material science, system identification and dynamics, machine reliability and atmospheric sciences to envision, develop and deploy computational-physics, data science and statistical forecasting models to deliver machine- and fleet-specific life extension actions.

Prior to building the team at Sentient Science, Dr. Kumar has served in variety of leadership roles in the wind energy industry working for and advising world’s largest wind energy producers, financiers, operators and consumers. His educational journey to a PhD in environmental fluid mechanics consists of academic stints at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, University of Karlsruhe and Johns Hopkins University. Through a combination of his educational credentials, diverse high-impact industry pursuits and inter-disciplinary problem-solving skills, Dr. Kumar has established himself as a go-to technical problem-solving expert in the wind energy industry

Dr. Kumar is based out of Boston with his family of a complaining wife and two hyper-active children. In his spare time, he can be either found on social media dispelling myths and busting AI hype or teaching mindfulness and Hindi to young kids!

Professor, Electrical Engineering, University at Buffalo
Michael Langberg received his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1996, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998 and 2003 respectively. Between 2003 and 2006, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at the California Institute of Technology, and between 2007 and 2012 he was in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at The Open University of Israel. Prof. Langberg is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo.

Prof. Langberg's research addresses the mathematical foundations of information, and in particular the design and analysis of efficient and reliable algorithms for the communication, management, and storage of information. Major topics of study include the fundamental algorithmic and combinatorial challenges that arise in the study of point-to-point communication, network communication, data storage, and succinct data representation. Prof. Langberg was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory during the years 2012-2015 and the Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter during the years 2015-2018.

Research professor, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics; Professor of Oncology, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center
Martin Morgan has worked on the R / Bioconductor project for the statistical analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data for more than 12 years. He has previously held positions at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Washington State University. Martin's original training was in evolutionary genetics, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Management Science and Systems, University at Buffalo

Pavankumar Mulgund's research interests include health information systems, database technologies and risk management. He brings more than a decade's industry experience in database management and technology consulting. He has taught multiple graduate and undergraduate courses in Database management systems and Systems analysis and design.

Director, Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering; Director, Center for Computational Research; Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abani Patra obtained a Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas-Austin in 1995. After a short post-doctoral stint he joined the University at Buffalo, Mechanical and Aerospace department in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 2004. He spent three years at the National Science Foundation as a program director in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure from 2007-10. He has been actively engaged in computational science research and was among the founding members of the Centers for Computational Research and the Center for Geohazards at Buffalo as well as the Institute for Computational and Data Enabled Sciences. He has published numerous articles on topics ranging from adaptive meshing and error analysis of finite elements, HPC and more recently large data driven methodologies. The TITAN2D toolkit, developed by Patra and co-workers is used by over 200 groups worldwide for mass flow hazard analysis.

Teaching Associate Professor/Research Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo
Bina Ramamurthy has been involved in STEM research, curriculum development and instruction for the past two decades. Her current interest is in Blockchain application development. She also teaches courses in data-intensive computing and emerging applications and platforms such as Hadoop, Spark and Tensorflow. She is the Program Director of the SUNY approved certificate program on Data-intensive Computing at University at Buffalo and the Principal Investigator on four National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and a co-investigator in six Instructional Innovative Instructional Technology grants (SUNY-IITG).

Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager; Director of Global Analytics, American Century Investments
Mr. Satish oversees the firm's comprehensive risk management program.  He also works with the company's investment management and product development teams on engineering new investment strategies.

Mr. Satish joined American Century Investments from Allstate Corporation, where he served as a senior managing director and portfolio manager for the performance-based strategies group. Previously, he was chief risk officer for Jamison Capital Partners LP, New York. Earlier, he was the chief risk officer, partner and a member of the investment committee at DKR Capital Partners LP, an asset management firm specializing in alternative investment strategies. He also was director of risk management at Soros Fund Management LLC.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Satish held quantitative research, risk management and investment management positions at State Street Bank and Trust and Barclays Capital. He received a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin, a master's in economics from the State University of New York, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and economics from Birla Institute of Science in Pilani, India. He is a CFA® charterholder.

Scientific Programmer, Center for Computational Research, University at Buffalo
Ms. Jeanette Sperhac has worked in information technology/computer science for more than 15 years, and holds M.S. degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science, and a bachelor of science in Chemistry. She joined the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research (CCR) in 2012. Ms. Sperhac supports the HUBzero-based VIDIA science gateway that provides students and researchers across SUNY with a powerful data analytics environment. She researches new tools and capabilities, deploys and upgrades tools and resources, and assists users in the use of high-performance computing.

Ms. Sperhac is a frequent speaker at the HUBzero conference, HUBbub, and the Gateway Computing Environments Conference. Since 2013, Ms. Sperhac has been the primary instructor for the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science, hosted at CCR, for which she designed and developed the curriculum. She mentors student interns at CCR, helping them to learn by doing software development, automated testing, portal development, data analysis, and scientific computing. Ms. Sperhac supports multiple software engineering and web application projects at CCR, providing software and database design, development, maintenance, enhancements, user support, data audit, and migration on projects that include: - XDMoD (https://xdmod.ccr.buffalo.edu), a comprehensive auditing framework used by XSEDE high performance computing centers. - The VHub portal (https://vhub.org/), which supports collaboration in volcanology research, sharing and development of tools to model volcanic processes and analyze data.