Computational Research Symposium 2025 Schedule of Events

Beatriz Peñalver Bernabé is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Peñalver Bernabé obtained her bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Murcia, Spain, and her master’s degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. After working in the polymeric industry for several years, she decided to return to academia, and she obtained her doctoral degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University, in systems reproduction biology. Dr. Peñalver Bernabé completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Jack Gilbert at the University of Chicago, where she focused on understanding the role of host-microbial interactions in human health. Her team focuses on conditions that affect women’s health during their reproductive lifespan, such as infertility, perinatal disorders and the menopause transition and employs a combination of advanced statistics, machine learning and network approaches to reveal the underpinnings that regulate these conditions.

Robert L. Grossman is the Frederick H. Rawson Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Computer Science and the Jim and Karen Frank Director of the Center for Translational Data Science at the University of Chicago.  He is a fellow of the AAAS and the ACM.  He is also the chair of the Open Commons Consortium, a nonprofit that develops and operates data commons to support research in science, medicine and healthcare.  He is the principal investigator for the National Cancer Institute Genomic Data Commons (GDC), one of the largest collections of harmonized cancer genomics data in the world.  He has also built data commons and data meshes to support research in other areas, including liquid biopsies, Veterans’ health, infectious diseases, heart and lung diseases, and the environment.  His research interests include data science, machine learning, deep learning and AI.

Lane Gunderman is currently a professor here at UIC in the ECE department, having obtained his bachelor’s degree from MIT in both physics and math, followed by a PhD from the Institute of Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He worked in industry at Xanadu Quantum Technologies and HRL Laboratories before joining the faculty. His primary research interests are theoretical aspects of quantum error-correcting codes, as well as the problems centering around the same tools.

Niranjan Karnik is the J. Usha Raj Professor of Psychiatry & Pediatrics, Director of the Institute for Juvenile Research, Co-Director of the Institute for Research on Addictions, Co-Director of the Center for Clinical & Translational Science, and Interim Director of the AI.Health4All Center at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His research focuses on data science, technology, and community-based interventions for vulnerable populations with psychiatric and substance use disorders. He presently leads or co-leads grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Hema Krishna is a clinician-scientist with expertise in advanced echocardiography. She serves as an imager for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s structural heart program and directs the University echocardiography laboratory.

Her active research interests center around the application of artificial intelligence technology in the assessment of valvular heart disease.

Dr. Krishna received her B.A. in biochemistry and political science at Case Western Reserve University and went on to obtain her M.D. from the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Following Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin, she completed her general cardiology fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she served as Chief Fellow in her final year. She subsequently completed Advanced Echocardiography fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.

She is currently funded through the American Society of Echocardiography Pamela S. Douglas MD, FASE Research Award and an affiliate scholar through the University of Illinois (UIC) at Chicago KL2 Clinical and Translational Science Scholars program, related to her work in aortic stenosis and machine learning in echocardiography. Dr. Krishna was recently selected to serve as a member of the American Society of Echocardiography Research Committee 2025-2027. Her prior publications have focused on valvular heart disease, echocardiography in COVID-19, and genetic aortopathies. Dr. Krishna co-directs the annual University of Illinois Cardiovascular Symposium for Primary Care & Hospital Medicine providers and is active in fellow-level educational leadership at UIC, in addition to serving in invited speaker roles at national cardiovascular meetings. She has received multiple awards, including the Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Cardiology Resident Teacher Award and the Thomas G. Stamos Award for Humanism and Clinical Excellence.

Ian Mondragon-Shem is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UIC, he held postdoctoral research positions at Northwestern University, Yale University, and Argonne National Laboratory. His research is situated at the interface of condensed matter theory and quantum information science and engineering, with a focus on quantum simulation, superconducting circuits, and non-equilibrium quantum systems.

Natalie Parde is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she also co-directs UIC’s Natural Language Processing Laboratory.  She is also a faculty member of the AI.Health4All Center for Health Equity using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.  Her research interests are in natural language processing, with emphases in healthcare applications, interactive systems, multimodality, and creative language.  Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, and other agencies.  She is a two-time winner of the College of Engineering Teaching Award and has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed publications.  She has served as an action editor for ACL Rolling Review, a guest editor for Computer Speech & Language, and a program committee member for many popular NLP conferences.

Arvind Ramanathan is a senior computational scientist in the data science and learning division at Argonne National Lab, where his group leads efforts in building autonomous laboratories for accelerating the design of therapeutics targeting biological signaling mechanisms in cancer.

Ameen Salahudeen, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. His research focus is on improving outcomes through novel technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to advance screening, diagnostic and therapeutic paradigms, including projects within the AI.Health4all Center initiative at the University of Illinois. As a medical oncologist, Salahudeen’s primary clinical interest lies in thoracic and head and neck oncology.

Caleb Williams is an ComEd Scholar and an undergraduate student doing a dual degree in physics and electrical engineering. He is interested in the mathematical foundations of physics and information theory. He is the president of the Quantum Information Science Society at UIC.