Hi, my name is Joy and I’m a PhD student from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt School of Medicine.

In addition to wanting to be an astronaut, for the majority of my life I was interested in medicine, but I always had a knack for math. In college, I couldn’t decide between studying biology or math, so I decided to do both. Thats when I discovered a whole new space of work that I was uniquely suited to contribute to. I want to solve mysteries in medicine and clinical research through clues found from computational and systemic approaches. I’ve contributed to medical research investigating Fc receptors of IgG1 and IgG4 monoclonal antibodies; I’ve contributed to bioinformatics research designing a methodology to semiautomatically annotate gene expression patterns; but here at PIRC I’m able to do biomedical informatics research. I’m interested in using machine learning techniques to find biomarkers of disease and development with neuroimaging datasets. My career goal is to develop methods and tractable tools to understand diseases, predict them and their outcomes. University of Pittsburgh and PIRC are ideal institutions for me, but not just because of their reputations. I value their emphasis on development and quantitative approaches, and its interdisciplinary. I work daily with clinicians, mathematicians, engineers, meddling kids, and talking dogs, all passionate about their community and how to contribute towards it. I am currently working with Dr. Rafael Ceschin in tracking development with multimodal neuroimaging methods, and exploring the utility of Diffusion Tensor Imaging in clinical applications.