I am an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Howard University. Prior to this, I was a senior data scientist at Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health where I worked on research projects in the intersection of medicine, public health, natural language processing, data science, and machine learning; also, in this role, I work on health system operations focused projects. My research focuses on developing and applying data science, machine learning, and natural language processing algorithms to large volumes of social media data and electronic medical records (EMR) data to gain insights and create value for patients and health care providers. I have worked on projects focused on: (a) predicting patients risk for cardiovascular disease and opioid use disorder (b) gaining insights as to how users communicate and the types of support they seek and give in online health forums associated with cancer, substance use recovery, loneliness, and COVID-19, and (c) analyzing consumer reviews about experiences of structural racism in Healthcare.
In my role as a senior data scientist at Penn Medicine, I also mentored students (medical students and computer science students) on developing and applying data science, machine learning, and natural language processing algorithms to health and public health related projects.
Prior to this role, I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania where I worked on several projects in collaboration with professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins, Howard University, Boston University, Villanova University, and University of Pennsylvania and I mentored 9 students. Also, while working as a post-doctoral fellow, I was the head teaching assistant for the Applied Machine Learning class in the Computer and Information Science department at University of Pennsylvania. My role as head teaching assistant was to manage 8 other teaching assistants, teach some of the recitations, and help come up with assignments and home works for the students. I completed my PhD at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Howard University.
I have served as a reviewer for the following journals and conferences: The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLOS ONE, International Journal of Drug Policy’s, Journal of General Internal Medicine, BMC primary care, the annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Annual conference of the North American chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL), the conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) , and the international conference on Computational Linguistics
