Healthcare Technology

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities

Martha Bushong — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:00:33 +0000

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities Martha Bushong Tue, 04/02/2024 - 08:00

In This Story

When people ask ��AV Associate Professor David Lattanzi why a civil engineer is working in forensic nursing science, he can only say, ‘Why not?’ Lattanzi is a co-principal investigator on research to develop a tool that will help clinicians and others assess bruises on victims of violence, particularly those with darker skin tones.

This work, led by principal investigator Katherine Scafide, associate professor in the College of Public Health, recently received a $4.86 million gift from an anonymous donor which extends the findings of an earlier Department of Justice grant that began more than three years ago.

The team’s multidisciplinary research combines Scafide’s work with alternate light source technology, co-PI Janusz Wojtusiak’s expertise in informatics, and Lattanzi’s knowledge of computer vision and deep learning to address challenges of identifying bruises and other injuries in victims of domestic violence.

“When I started at Mason 10 years ago, I never imagined that my work could have a societal impact like this,” said Lattanzi. But Lattanzi has always been interested in finding innovative solutions to real-world problems. A structural engineer by training, he spent his early years as a bridge and tunnel inspector. After seeing too many close calls while working on inspection sites, he thought there must be a better way. So he began using drones and imaging to address the next generation of infrastructure-inspection technologies—and make bridge inspection less dangerous.

Though drones aren’t part of this research, he and the team are using the image-based diagnostic techniques that began a decade ago. Now Lattanzi is enhancing these tools with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to examine human skin structures damaged by incidents of domestic violence.

According to a statement from the university, one in three women worldwide experience some form of violence. In the United States, more than 10 million women and men deal with interpersonal violence each year. These numbers tell only part of the story, because bruises are difficult to detect on darker skin tones, many victims miss out on getting the help they need.

The tool these researchers will build needs a large enough database to identify skin tones “accurately and equitably,” said Lattanzi. One of the important goals of the project, therefore, is to build a unique data repository that combines images of bruises and other injuries, with measurements, clinical and demographic information about the victim, and information inferred by artificial intelligence. Currently, the platform includes about 30,000 images of bruises collected using visible and alternative light sources.

“Having a massive database leads to better outcomes and measurably better outcomes for those victims downstream in terms of their care and in terms of their outcomes in the criminal justice system,” Lattanzi said.

The tool the Mason researchers are building could be an app on a smartphone that clinicians can use to assess the age of bruises. Lattanzi said they hope to have a prototype in a year, and possibly have the technology available for use in a couple of years.

Topics

Healthcare Technology

Artificial Intellgence

College of Engineering and Computing

College of Public Health

Research

Clinical Training Meets Virtual Reality

John Brandon Cantrell — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 14:29:32 +0000

Clinical Training Meets Virtual Reality John Brandon C… Wed, 04/20/2022 - 10:29

Graduate student Sindhu Mallala studies health informatics at Mason to gain a deeper understanding of how technology can transform all aspects of health care.

For Sindhu Mallala, serving as a physician in her home country of India is an honor. She learned about the essential role physicians have in health care while studying at the Dr. NTR University of Health Sciences in Andhra Pradesh, India. When she began practicing medicine, she realized the impact she could make by incorporating her dedication to helping others with her love of science and technology to resolve issues that health systems in India were experiencing.

"While working, I saw the amount of data we collected in a hospital [that] just sat in piles, as the concept of digital records is still not as established back home," said Mallala. "I looked up ways to make sense of it, like pieces of a puzzle to solve both medical and hospital issues; Health informatics was the answer to my question."

Mallala's mission to study health informatics fueled her move to America to gain a deeper understanding of how technology can transform the way health systems operate, especially in storing, managing, and accessing critical patient data more quickly and securely.

"The health informatics program at Mason is well-tailored,” Mallala said when asked why she chose Mason for graduate school. “I wanted to learn from the best, so I could go back home and use this in a way that helps everyone in my community."

While at Mason, Mallala pursued opportunities that gave her insight into just how impactful technology can be—not just for hospital operations but also for training the next generation of health care providers.

"Now that I have been on both sides of the spectrum, IT and as a health care provider, I have a better understanding of how to bridge the gaps in between,” Mallala said.

Discovering New Opportunities at the Virtual Reality Simulation Lab

Mallala teaching Mason President Dr. Gregory Washington how to use the virtual reality technology.

Mallala soon became a graduate teaching assistant at the College’s Virtual Reality Simulation Lab, an opportunity that allowed her to have a direct role in discovering how technology can reshape the future of health care. The Lab provides students in various health majors with interdisciplinary opportunities to practice the skills they learn in class through virtual real-world scenarios. For Mallala, this was a chance to incorporate her clinical background with her newfound knowledge of health informatics.

"The Virtual Reality Lab encourages critical thinking and provides a safe space to practice and make mistakes," said Mallala. "Improving technical and patient communication skills are two primary goals of our Lab. We practice evidence-based medicine, and most of the cases that we practice are with diagnoses that students might come across during their [training]."

Having the opportunity to help prepare future health care professionals through virtual reality technology has developed Mallala's perspective on the possible ways technology can enhance health care delivery and training. With her education in health informatics and experience as a physician, she selects appropriate cases for students to explore in virtual reality that align with their course requirements. She also assists Bethany Cieslowski, VR and simulation coordinator in the School of Nursing, in setting up the lab and debriefing with students about the cases they completed.

Until Mason, Mallala said that she did not consider virtual reality simulation as a way to train medical professionals.

"I find the concept of learning skills and practicing patient case management in a lab to be quite intriguing,” she said. “The Lab serves as an opportunity [to prepare students] to handle cases in an informed and methodical way. I've gained a great deal of knowledge from this interprofessional association of informatics and nursing. My perspective on education has shifted significantly as a result of the Virtual Reality Lab. I personally learned a great deal from Dr. Bethany Cieslowski, my mentor, about how to engage students and encourage participation."

In her pursuit to strengthen herself as a physician by obtaining a master's degree in health informatics, Mallala values the many opportunities she receives at Mason that have aided her along her journey in health care. Now, she looks to the future for ways she can further health and technology research by applying her clinical knowledge with her newfound technological skills.

"Now that I have been on both sides of the spectrum, IT and as a health care provider, I have a better understanding of how to bridge the gaps in between,” Mallala said.

Topics

CHHS News

Health Informatics

Healthcare Technology

Training

Department of Health Administration and Policy

HAP News

Student Spotlight

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

Introducing the Innovate for Good Series

John Brandon Cantrell — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 13:52:43 +0000

Introducing the Innovate for Good Series John Brandon C… Fri, 02/04/2022 - 08:52

Innovate for Good is a new ongoing series that examines how faculty in the College of Health and Human Services are improving health outcomes using technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and personal apps.

Part I: Reducing Caregiver Stress & Improving Recovery Cues

By its very nature, the practice of social work involves people. After all, the definition of social work is, essentially, people helping people. But in an era of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and machine learning, technology is playing an increasingly central role in how people help people.

In ��AV’s College of Health and Human Services, faculty members from the Department of Social Work are embracing technological innovation in its many forms to advance the practice of social work.

“In the field of social work, our goal has always been to figure out how to help those in our communities, whether through practice, organizational leadership, or policymaking,” said Emily S. Ihara, chair of the Department of Social Work. “What’s new is that we’re looking at fresh ways to gather more data to assess how we can best and most efficiently create social change.”

Innovate for Good begins with two ways researchers are using apps and virtual reality to improve the lives and health of those they work with.

Managing and Minimizing Caregiver Stress with a Phone

Caregiver burnout? There’s an app for that.

Funded by a Virginia Center on Aging, Alzheimer’s & Related Diseases Research Award Fund (ARDRAF) grant of $45,000, Ihara and Cathy Tompkins, professor of Social Work, are working with developers Ram Balasubramanian and Atreya Chaganty to help those who provide care for people living with dementia.

They are evaluating use of an app called Zelar developed by health care company Mantrah. This app will be geared toward caregivers with the intent of helping them manage the care of both the dementia patients they help and themselves.

“Care partners are often overwhelmed,” said Ihara. “The idea is that caregivers will enter information about different aspects of the care plan and they will be given reminders and helpful tips to provide organization.”

The app will have several features, including care plan creation, the ability for collaboration with other caregivers, plus self-care plans, a journaling option, and insights that provide feedback to caregivers on their reported performance.

“We’re trying to see if we can use technology to reduce caregiver stress,” said Ihara.

The project, Managing Mental Health Through Technology: Examining the Effects of Collaborative Care Management Technology Application, is being developed with Mantrah.

“In the field of social work, our goal has always been to figure out how to help those in our communities, whether through practice, organizational leadership, or policymaking. What’s new is that we’re looking at fresh ways to gather more data to assess how we can best and most efficiently create social change.”

Emily S. Ihara, Chair of the Department of Social Work

Harnessing the Power of Recovery Cues with Virtual Reality

A multidisciplinary team of researchers, working across four colleges and centers at Mason, is using technology to develop customized, real-time recovery supports to prevent drug relapse.

The research team is made up of Holly Matto in the Department of Social Work, along with Padmanabhan Seshaiyer in Mason’s College of Science, Stephanie Carmack in Mason’s Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions, Nathalia Peixoto in Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering, Siddharth Bhattacharya in Mason’s School of Business, plus graduate students in engineering Vinicius Zanini and Bryce Dunn and in social work Cate Feldkamp, as well as Rudra Nagalia, a Mason intern and student at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, in Pilani, India.

The team hypothesizes that they can disrupt the drug trigger-craving-relapse cycle by reorienting people to what is personally rewarding in their lives and regulating the brain and body’s response to drug triggers. These are known as recovery cues.

This idea was inspired by Matto’s work in the field of addiction and from the lived experiences of people in recovery. After treatment, individuals often go back to the same environments that trigger a desire to use drugs, resulting in a need for ongoing, consistent support.

“Because craving can still be quite intense even after months of abstinence, real-time interventions to support recovery are essential to preventing relapse long-term,” said Matto. Examples of recovery cues include music, soundscapes, inspirational quotes, and more.

The Mason team and its industry partner, Brightline Interactive, are examining the effects of recovery cues using virtual reality simulations. The work is being supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse through a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Grant.

“Rather than focusing on drug triggers, our team believes that by focusing on the rewarding parts of their lives, their recovery cues and supports, individuals in recovery can strengthen and grow,” said Matto.

Virtual reality is unique among other technological enhancements in that it can recreate some elements of the social situations and physical environments that typically trigger relapse, allowing patients to practice skills they will need when they encounter such situations in real life.

Along with investigating recovery cues using virtual reality, the team is developing their Recovery Engaged Mind (REMind-h) app. In this app, individuals in recovery will be able to upload their customized recovery cues according to their preferred sensory modality (visual, auditory, tactile) and content category (people, places, objects), and be able to access these cues when experiencing intense craving.

Innovate for Good is an ongoing series that examines how Mason faculty in the College of Health and Human Services are harnessing technology to improve health outcomes.

Topics

Healthcare Technology

Addiction

Recovery

In the George

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments

Martha Bushong — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:32:56 +0000

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments Martha Bushong Fri, 02/26/2021 - 08:32

Topics

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Healthcare Technology

In This Story

Jeffrey Moran

A Mason Engineering researcher has discovered that artificial microswimmers accumulate where their speed is minimized, an idea that could have implications for improving the efficacy of targeted cancer therapy.

Jeff Moran, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Volgenau School of Engineering, and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle studied self-propelled half-platinum/half-gold rods that “swim” in water using hydrogen peroxide as a fuel. The more peroxide there is, the faster the swimming; without peroxide in pure water, the rods don’t swim.

In this work, they set out to understand what happens when these artificial microswimmers are placed in a fluid reservoir containing a gradient of hydrogen peroxide––lots of peroxide on one side, not much on the other side.

They found that, predictably, the microswimmers swam faster in regions with high peroxide concentration, says Moran, whose research was published in the new issue of Scientific Reports.

As others had observed, the direction of swimming varied randomly in time as the swimmers explored their surroundings. In contrast, in the low-concentration regions, the rods slowed down and accumulated in these regions over the course of a few minutes.

The results suggest a simple strategy to make microswimmers passively accumulate in specific regions, an idea that might have useful, practical applications, he says.

Swimming at the microscopic scale is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology, Moran says. “Lots of cells and microorganisms, such as bacteria, can autonomously swim toward higher or lower concentrations of chemicals that benefit or harm the cell, respectively.”

This behavior is called chemotaxis, and it’s both common and important, he says. “For example, your immune cells use chemotaxis to detect and swim toward sites of injury, so they can initiate tissue repair.”

Moran and colleagues, like others in the field, have long been curious whether artificial microswimmers can mimic cells by performing chemotaxis, continuously swimming toward higher chemical concentrations. Some had claimed that the platinum/gold rods, in particular, could swim autonomously toward peroxide-rich regions.

“We were skeptical of these claims since the rods aren’t alive, and therefore they don’t have the sensing and response capabilities that are necessary for cells to execute this behavior,” he says.

“Instead, we found the opposite: the rods built up in the lower concentration regions. This is the opposite of what one would expect from chemotaxis,” Moran says.

The researchers conducted computer simulations that predicted this and validated them with experiments, he says.

“We propose a simple explanation for this behavior: Wherever they are, the rods move in randomly varying directions, exploring their surroundings. When they get to a low-fuel region, they can’t explore as vigorously. In a sense, they get trapped in their comfort zones,” Moran says.

“Conversely, in the high-peroxide regions, they move at higher speeds and, because their direction is constantly changing, escape from these regions more often. Over time, the net result is that rods accumulate in low-concentration regions,” he says. “They don’t have any intelligence. They end up where their mobility is the lowest.”

Moran says this research is promising from a technical standpoint because it suggests a new strategy to make chemicals accumulate in a highly acidic area.

“Due to their abnormal metabolic processes, cancer cells cause their immediate surroundings to become acidic. These are the cells that need the most drugs because the acidic environment is known to promote metastasis and confer resistance to drugs. Thus, the cells in these regions are a major target of many cancer therapies.”

Moran and colleagues are now designing microswimmers that move slowly in acidic regions and fast in neutral or basic regions. Through the mechanism they discovered here, they hypothesize that acid-dependent swimmers will accumulate and release their cargo preferentially where their speeds are minimized, namely the most acidic and hypoxic regions of the tumor, where the most problematic cells reside.

There is much more research to be conducted, but “these rods may have the ability to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the cancer cells that need them the most,” Moran says.

“To be clear, our study doesn’t prove that chemotaxis is impossible in artificial microswimmers, period; just that these particular microswimmers don’t undergo chemotaxis.

“Instead, we’ve identified an elegantly simple method of causing unguided microswimmers to accumulate and deliver drugs to the most problematic cancer cells, which could have implications for the treatment of many cancers, as well as other diseases like fibrosis. We’re excited to see where this goes.”

Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees

Melanie Balog — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:06:27 +0000

Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees Melanie Balog Tue, 11/10/2020 - 18:06

Siddhartha Sikdar. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

Bioengineering professor Siddhartha Sikdar is using technology to help individuals with limb loss better control their prostheses.

His team is investigating a new way to operate prostheses using ultrasound waves to sense muscle activity.

“Our goal is to help amputees go about their daily lives with improved function,” says Siddhartha Sikdar, who is director of the Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions (CASBBI).

Approximately 50,000 individuals are living with upper limb loss in the United States. A large proportion (35 to 45 percent) of people with upper extremity amputations discontinue the use of their prosthesis, mainly due to limited functionality and usability, Sikdar said, and there is a significant unmet need to develop better technological solutions to improve function.

His research group was recently awarded a Bioengineering Research Partnership grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop this technology for commercial use and perform clinical trials.

They are collaborating with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to test this technology in a military population using another new grant from the Department of Defense. They also have a grant from the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund to explore prosthetic training applications using a wearable ultrasound system.

The team is completing additional preliminary studies in amputee subjects using a benchtop system. In the meantime, they are in the process of miniaturizing the ultrasound instrumentation to incorporate it inside a prosthetic socket and developing and testing embedded algorithms for interpreting the ultrasound signals for controlling the prosthetic hands.

The next steps are to perform laboratory tests of an integrated system with people with amputations and perform safety evaluations in preparation for seeking FDA approval.

The successful completion of this research will lead to the first human evaluation of an integrated prototype that uses low-power portable imaging sensors and real-time image analysis to sense residual muscle activity for prosthetic control, he says.

“In the long term, we anticipate that the improvements in functionality and intuitiveness of control will increase acceptance by amputees,” Sikdar says.

Jiayang Sun

Martha Bushong — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 02:35:16 +0000

Jiayang Sun Martha Bushong Mon, 08/26/2019 - 22:35

Professor, Bernard Dunn Eminent Scholar, and Chair; Department of Statistics

Contact Information

Phone: (703) 993-4732
Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering Building
Room 1702
Mail Stop: 4A7

Personal Websites

Personal Website

Biography

Jiayang Sun brings the sharp focus she uses when rock climbing and ballroom dancing to her role as chair of Mason's College of Engineering and Computing's Department of Statistics. Just as a strategy is a must with both activities, Sun's position requires a similar mindset. Her vision is to put the department in the national spotlight for statistical research and data science.

Jiayang Sun is professor, chair, and Bernard Dunn Eminent Scholar at the Department of Statistics, ��AV. She received her PhD in statistics from Stanford University. Before joining Mason in August 2019, she was a professor of the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and the Director of the Center for Statistical Research, Computing and Collaboration (SR2c), Case Western Reserve University. She also served as the inaugurate ASA/ACM/AMS/IMS/MAA/SIAM Science & Technology Policy Fellow, working as the Big Data Senior Fellow for Big Data Analytics in the leadership team for Partnerships for PDI at the USDA ARS, Office of National Programs between 9/1/2019-8/31/2020.

She is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). She was the 2016 President of the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS) and has been on various committees in the ASA, IMS, CWS, ISI, and other national and international professional panels and boards. Her work has been supported by awards from the NSF, NIH, NSA, DOD, DOE, VA, and ASA.

She has published in top statistical and computational journals, including Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Annals of Probability, Biometrika, Statistical Science, Biometrical Journal, Statistics in Medicine, JCGS, and SIAM J Sci. & Stat. Comp, and other statistical and scientific journals. Her statistical research has included simultaneous confidence regions and multiple testing, selection bias and measurement errors, mixtures and image analysis, machine learning, causal inference, semiparametric and non-parametric problems, statistical computing, graphics, data analytics, bioinformatics, and big data. Her interdisciplinary work has included cancer, environmental science, imaging, neuroscience, wound care, dental, and other medical sciences, in addition to astronomy, computer science, energy, law, and now agriculture.

Her work has been supported by awards from the NSF, NIH, NSA, DoD, DOE, VA, and ASA.

Research Interests:

Simultaneous inference and Multiple Testing
Biased sampling and Measurement Errors
Mixtures and Statistical Imaging
Data mining, Longitudinal, and High-dimensional Data
Bioinformatics and Statistical Computing
Semi, Non-parametric, and Random Fields
Software Research
Interdisciplinary Work

Jeffrey Moran

admin_alpha — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 23:08:01 +0000

Jeffrey Moran admin_alpha Tue, 02/06/2018 - 18:08

Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering and affiliate faculty in Bioengineering

Contact Information

Phone: 703-993-5636
Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering Building
Room 2709
Mail Stop: 6E9
Email: jmoran23@gmu.edu

Personal Websites

Research Group

Fact Sheet

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January 25, 2024
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December 14, 2022
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December 9, 2022

Biography

Jeffrey Moran's research interests lie in understanding and using micro-scale thermal-fluid transport phenomena to enable new solutions to fundamental challenges facing humanity, including sustainable energy, environmental remediation, and cancer treatment. His doctoral work helped explain the physical mechanism for the self-propulsion of "catalytic micromotors," which are micrometer-size metallic rods (50 times smaller than the width of a human hair) that can "swim" and carry cargo through liquids. These rods are one subclass of "active colloids," microscopic self-propelled particles, that show promise for such applications as enhanced oil recovery, manufacturing of micro- and nanometer-scale structures, and even targeted drug delivery in the human body.

Moran received several awards, including the Young Researcher Award from the International Workshop on Micro/Nanomachines, the Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from MIT, and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Outside of research, he is committed to science and engineering education in and out of the classroom. He has given workshops at local science museums and lectured (at both the general and technical levels) to university and high school students throughout the US and internationally.

Degrees

PhD, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington
MS, Mechanical Engineering, Arizona State University
BS, Mechanical Engineering, Arizona State University

Research Interests

Self-propelled nanoparticles
Mechanobiology
Extracellular matrix
Microbiology
Fluid dynamics
Heat transfer

Publications

Google Scholar

Özlem Uzuner

admin_alpha — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 18:00:01 +0000

Özlem Uzuner admin_alpha Fri, 08/25/2017 - 14:00

Professor, Department Chair / Tenured

Contact Information

Phone: (703) 993-5996

Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering
Room 5405
Mail Stop: 1G8

In the News

Chair's Letter, Information Sciences and Technology
November 8, 2021

Biography

Özlem Uzuner, department chair of Information Sciences and Technology, speaks three languages—English, French, and Turkish—but it’s her fourth language that could help save lives.

Uzuner is an expert in natural language processing, a field of computer science that involves turning human language into coded form. She is working on algorithms that translate physicians’ narratives about their patients into data that can be analyzed to find better treatments.

Uzuner is also a research affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT. She specializes in Natural Language Processing and its applications to real-world problems, including healthcare and policy. Her current research interests include information extraction from fragmented and ungrammatical narratives for capturing meaning, studies of consumer-generated text such as social media and electronic petitions, and semantic representation development for phenotype prediction, fraud detection, and topic modeling. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Libraries of Medicine, National Institutes of Mental Health, Office of the National Coordinator, and by industry.

“I want to help patients get the treatment they need, get it when they need it, and get it faster,” Uzuner says. “Health is the most important thing. If you are not healthy, you don’t have anything.”

ORCID: 0000-0001-8011-9850

Degrees

PhD, Technology Management and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MEng, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing
Health Informatics
Public Health Informatics
Mental Health Informatics
Computational Social Science

Elise Miller-Hooks

admin_alpha — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 09:40:01 +0000

Elise Miller-Hooks admin_alpha Sun, 08/28/2016 - 05:40

Professor and Department Chair; affiliate faculty Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair

Contact Information

Phone: 703-993-1685
Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering Building
Room 4614

Email: miller@gmu.edu

Related Programs

Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, MS

In the News

Mason researchers study the complicated and cascading effects of Arctic ice melt

Mason team collaborates with the World Bank to launch MASH-Pandemics

Personal Websites

Miller-Hooks' Complete Profile

Biography

For over two decades, Elise Miller-Hooks has been applying and advancing operations research concepts to civil and infrastructure systems applications.

Miller-Hooks is driven by a strong desire to make a positive impact on society, and her research program reflects this motivation. Together with her students and post-docs, she focuses on creating mathematically-based decision-support tools and algorithms that can be used to design, manage, operate, maintain, and protect the built environment. Her research has been supported by various sources, including private organizations, non-profits, and local, national, and international government agencies.

Miller-Hooks holds a PhD in Civil Engineering and an MS in Engineering from the University of Texas - Austin, as well as a BS in Civil Engineering from Lafayette College. Prior to joining Mason, she served as a program director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and on the faculties of the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, and Duke University. Now, Miller-Hooks holds the Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair in Infrastructure Engineering in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering at ��AV.

Research Spotlight:

Elise Miller-Hooks is one of the faculty members diving into how melting ice in the Arctic will affect the people, habitats, and social fabric of the remote region. She says the team’s work has opened her eyes to the interconnectedness of our world. Although she has traveled around the globe, she never thought she would visit the Arctic—it seemed so distant and remote. “I realize now that we are all in this together. What happens in Nuuk, Greenland or Barrow, Alaska affects us all.”
Read more about this research or watch the video below.

Teaching Interests:

Civil Infrastructure Systems Modeling
Transportation Systems Engineering
Network Algorithms
Multi-Objective Decision-Making

Research Interests:

Multi-Hazard Civil Infrastructure Resilience Quantification
Disaster Planning, Evacuation, and Response
Stochastic and Dynamic Network Algorithms
Mathematical Modeling and Optimization
Transportation Systems Engineering
Intermodal Passenger and Freight Transport
Alternative Modes (Paratransit, Ridesharing, Bikeways)
Real-Time Routing and Fleet Management
Incident Management
Transportation Infrastructure Investment for Climate Uncertainty
Collaborative and Multi-Objective Decision-Making

William Rosenberger

admin_alpha — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 23:27:01 +0000

William Rosenberger admin_alpha Tue, 10/20/2015 - 19:27

Distinguished University Professor, Statistics

Contact Information

Phone: 703-993-3160
Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering Building
Room 2710
Mail Stop: 4A7

Email: wrosenbe@gmu.edu

Personal Websites

Personal Website

In the News

Biography

William F. Rosenberger is a Distinguished University Professor at ��AV. He received his PhD in mathematical statistics from George Washington University in 1992 and since then has spent much of his career developing statistical methodology for randomized clinical trials. He has two books on the subject, Randomization in Clinical Trials: Theory and Practice (Wiley, 2002), which won the Association of American Publishers Award for the best mathematics/statistics book published that year, and has recently been issued in a second edition (Wiley, 2016); and The Theory of Response-Adaptive Randomization in Clinical Trials (Wiley, 2006). He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2005) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2011).

An author of over 100 refereed papers, Prof. Rosenberger was named the 2012 Outstanding Research Faculty by the Volgenau School of Engineering, ��AV, where he also served as Chairman of their Department of Statistics for 13 years, hiring 16 faculty and developing programs at the BS, MS and PhD levels. In 2014, he received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to support his sabbatical at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. That same year he was promoted to the rank of University Professor (Distinguished University Professor, 2023), which is reserved for “eminent” individuals on the faculty “of great national or international reputation.” Only 32 out of 1400 faculty at George Mason have this distinction. In 2017 he was named the 15th Armitage Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was elected the North American Editor of the tier-1 biostatistical methodology journal Biometrics, for 2021-2024.

He has supervised 20 doctoral students who are now leaders in academia, industry, and government. Sponsored Research Projects: 2022—2023 Prospective Change in Preclinical MRI Markers of ADRD Risk and Brain Aging by Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Sex National Institute of Aging Principal Investigator, Subcontract to UMBC 2022 – 2027 HEAL: Multimodal Imaging Biomarkers for Investigating Fascia, Muscle and Vasculature in Myofascial Pain National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health Co-Investigator.

Degrees

PhD, Mathematical Statistics, George Washington University

Research

2009 - 2015: HANDLS Scan Substudy: Race, Socioeconomic Status, and the Brain. Funded by the University of Maryland.

2010 - 2015: Pathogenesis and Pathophysiological Mechanisms of Myofascial Tigger Points. Funded by the National Institutes of Health.

2010 - 2013 : ARRA: Statistical Methods in Cancer Research. Funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Research Interests

Biopharmaceutical statistics
Design and analysis of clinical trials
Randomization
Sequential design and analysis

Healthcare Technology

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities

In This Story

Watch the interview

Learn more about the research

Topics

Clinical Training Meets Virtual Reality

Graduate student Sindhu Mallala studies health informatics at Mason to gain a deeper understanding of how technology can transform all aspects of health care.

Discovering New Opportunities at the Virtual Reality Simulation Lab

Topics

Introducing the Innovate for Good Series

Innovate for Good is a new ongoing series that examines how faculty in the College of Health and Human Services are improving health outcomes using technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and personal apps.

Topics

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments

Topics

In This Story

Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees

Jiayang Sun

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Jeffrey Moran

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Özlem Uzuner

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Elise Miller-Hooks

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William Rosenberger

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