Meet the 2019 Fellows

Yifeng Tao is a Ph.D. student in the Computational Biology Department working with Professor of Biological Sciences and Computational Biology Russell Schwartz. His research focuses on developing machine learning, text mining and phylogenetic methods in cancer genomics by incorporating domain knowledge for precision medicine and personalized treatment. He holds a master's degree in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon and a bachelor's degree in automation from Tsinghua University.
Fellowship Research: Genomically Driven Personalized Medicine of Cancers via Explainable Deep Learning Models

Shahan Ali Memon is a master's student in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). He earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. His prior research falls into a diverse set of areas, including social computing, voice forensics, digital health and machine learning. Prior to joining the master's program, he was a research scholar in the LTI, working on the estimation of speaker traits and states. His research interests also lie at the intersection of network science and digital health. In that regard, his undergraduate thesis was in collaboration with Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) on monitoring lifestyle diseases using population search behavior.
Fellowship Research: Identifying Effective Communication Paradigm for Debunking Public Health Misinformation in Cyber Communities

Vikram Kamath Cannanure is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he is co-advised by professors Amy Ogan and Tim Brown. His research area is HCI for development, and he's focused on building and evaluating appropriate phone call and SMS-based systems for the developing world. Prior to starting his Ph.D., he interned at the United Nations University in Macau and has worked as a software developer for five years. He holds a master's degree from CMU's METALS program and obtained his bachelor's from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka.
Fellowship Research: Intelligent Voice-Based Systems for Maternal Mental Health in Rwanda

Xiangrui Zeng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computational Biology Department, advised by Assistant Research Professor Min Xu. Before coming to CMU, Xiangrui did his undergraduate study at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was advised by Professor George Tseng on biostatistics research in genomics and unsupervised learning. Xiangrui's current research focuses on developing 3D computer vision techniques for the analysis of cellular cryo-electron tomography (Cryo-ET) data. He has designed a number of statistical learning or deep learning based frameworks for Cryo-ET macromolecular structure classification, segmentation and recovery.
Fellowship Research: Bridging the Gap Between Cryo-Electron Tomography and Medical Diagnosis

Ben Lengerich is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department and a secondary master's student in the Machine Learning Department. His research focuses on designing new methods for precision medicine, including personalized and interpretable machine learning with applications to computational genomics. He holds bachelor's degrees in computer science and mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University.
Fellowship Research: Connecting Histopathology Images With Transcriptomics for Precision Oncology

Ellen Vitercik is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department, where she is co-advised by professors Nina Balcan and Tuomas Sandholm. Her honors include the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Before joining CMU, she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University.
Fellowship Research: Learning To Impute Missing Medical Data

Sandy Ritchie is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Her research focuses on using revolutionary manufacturing techniques, especially additive manufacturing, to create next-generation medical and scientific devices, specifically brain-machine interfaces. Sandy graduated with her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Mississippi State University, where she participated in research related to the viability of additive manufacturing in different fields.
Fellowship Research: CMU Array: Next-Generation Brain-Machine Interfaces by Rapid 3D Printing of Metal Nanoparticles

Muhammad Ahmed Shah is a first-year master's student in the Language Technologies Institute. His research interests include acoustic analysis, speech recognition, machine learning and information retrieval. He holds an undergraduate degree in computer science from CMU.
Fellowship Research: Towards Automated Cardiac Auscultation