• Hometown: Henan, China
• Faculty mentor/advisor: Tianbao Yang, Associate Professor
• What is your degree program and expected graduation date? Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 2022
• Please describe your research: My research focuses on developing robust machine learning solutions to diagnose diseases from imbalanced medical images, such as melanoma and pneumonia.
• In simple terms, why does this research matter? Medical data suffers from a very imbalance problem due to the expensive cost to acquire and label the positive samples. Therefore, developing robust disease diagnosis solutions using limited data is very essential.
• How soon after starting at the University of Iowa were you able to participate in research? I started research in my first year at University of Iowa.
• How has being involved in research made you more successful at the University of Iowa? The knowledge and skills I acquired from many research projects – problem solving, critical thinking, programming, collaborating with others, etc. – enhance my expertise in machine learning and will benefit my further career developments.
• What are your career goals and/or plans after graduation? My career goal is to use what I learn in machine learning to develop practical and robust tools to facilitate people’s lives.
• Does your research have connections to or implications for COVID-19? Please explain.   I develop a robust framework to train deep learning models to detect chest and lung diseases (e.g., pneumonia and lung lesion) from X-ray images, which can be directly applied to training models to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images.

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