Speaker Bio

Dr. Gopalakrishnan is a tenured associate professor of biomedical Informatics. Her primary research focus over the past two decades has been on biomarker discovery from multiple types of biomedical data via novel integrative modeling using hybrid machine learning methods being developed and tested in her lab. She is fundamentally interested in technologies for data mining and discovery that allow incorporation of prior knowledge.  Her lab has applied novel variants of rule learning techniques for biomarker discovery, prediction and monitoring of diverse diseases including neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, lung, breast and esophageal cancers, and parasitic infectious disease such as Helminths. Multiple types of ‘omic’ data obtained from genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and microbiome profiling have been analyzed, leading to insights regarding biomarkers and molecular mechanisms that underlie chronic disease. Biomarkers for early detection of lung and esophageal cancers have been validated across institutional studies. Dr. Gopalakrishnan was a co-leader of the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics core for a decade as part of the NCI-funded Lung SPORE project. She also was the first formal director of the CoSBBI (Computer Science, Biology, and Biomedical Informatics) program which now forms a core part of the Hillman Academy that trains rising high school juniors and seniors in cancer related STEM research. Dr. Gopalakrishnan also served recently as the director of the Intelligent Systems Program in the School of Computing and Information, which is a highly selective multidisciplinary applied AI graduate degree program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research includes investigating hypotheses about drug-treatment outcomes in chronic disease using large scale networks of electronic health records.