Organizing Faculty
Vivek ShettyUCLA
Vivek Shetty
UCLA vshetty(at)ucla.eduPrincipal Investigator, NIH Training Institutes for mHealth Methodologies (1R25DA038167) Director- Training Core, NIH Mobile Sensor Data-To-Knowledge (MD2K) Center
Dr. Shetty is a Professor of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. An early mover in the mHealth space, he works on point of care technologies to facilitate informed clinical decision making and population health management. His research program has been funded continuously by NIH since 1993. Beyond his research and clinical roles, he is deeply involved in academic governance, having served as Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research, and a member of UCLA’s central Committee on Academic Personnel that makes the final tenure and promotion recommendations. Dr. Shetty has been a core faculty of the NIH’s mHealth Training Institutes since its inception in 2011 and also directs the training core of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge.
Donna Spruijt-Metz
USC dmetz(at)usc.eduDirector of the mHealth Collaboratory at the Center for Economic and Social Research; Professor of Research in Psychology and Preventive Medicine,
University of Southern California
Donna Spruijt-Metz is Director of the USC mHealth Collaboratory at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research, and Professor of Research in Psychology and Preventive Medicine. Her research focuses on childhood obesity and mobile health technologies. In 2015, she received the Obesity Society’s eHealth/mHealth Pioneer Award for Excellence in the Field. Her main interests include using mobile technologies to develop data sets that combine sensor and self-report data that is continuous, temporally rich, contextualized. Using this data along with innovative modeling techniques, she wants to develop dynamic, contextualized mathematical models of health-related behavior. She was one of the first to undertake a just-in-time, adaptive intervention (JITAI) in youth, and envisions most or all interventions being JITAI in the future. She is PI of Virtual Sprouts, a virtual, multiplatform gardening game designed to change dietary knowledge and behavior and prevent obesity in minority youth. She also leads a new project, the Monitoring & Modeling Family Eating Dynamics (M2FED) project, funded by NSF She led an NSF/EU/NIH-funded workshop in Brussels on building new computationally-enabled theoretical models to support health behavior change and maintenance in 2012. This workshop led to several publications, and a host of new collaborations. In September, she led a follow-up NSF-funded international workshop in London. Her work meshes 21st century technologies with transdisciplinary metabolic, behavioral and environmental research in order to facilitate the development of dynamic, personalized, contextualized behavioral interventions that can be adapted on the fly.
Bonnie SpringNorthwestern
Bonnie Spring
Northwestern bspring(at)northwestern.eduProfessor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, Psychiatry and Public Health.
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Dr. Spring is a Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Public Health at Northwestern and Director of the Center for Behavior and Health - Institute for Public Health and Medicine. She also serves as Team Science Director for NUCATS, Northwestern’s CTSI, and Co-Program Leader for Cancer Prevention. Her research program focuses on the development and evaluation of technology supported interventions to promote healthy change in multiple chronic disease risk behaviors (particularly poor quality diet, overeating, physical inactivity, and smoking). She began conducting trials using connective mHealth technologies to promote healthy lifestyle change in the era when palm pilots were cutting edge technology. Current NIH- and American Heart Association (AHA)-funded mHealth studies by her group involve the use of wearables in the MD2K JITAI to prevent relapse to smoking, MOST factorial and SMART trials to treat obesity, and a cluster randomized trial to preserve and promote college student health. She is currently Chairperson of the NIH Psychosocial Risk and Disease Prevention standing study section, and her research has been funded continuously for more than 30 years. A past president of the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM), she is a recipient of SBM’s Distinguished Research Mentor and Research to Practice Translation awards. A winner of The Obesity Society’s e-Health Pioneer Award, she is founding editor of Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research, and served as Chairperson of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs and AHA’s Behavior Change Committee and member of the APA’s Advisory Steering Committee to establish Practice Guidelines. For many years, she has served as faculty for the NIH Summer Training Institute on Behavioral Clinical Trials and NIH Training Institutes on Mobile Health. She is Principal Investigator of Northwestern’s NIH T32 Postdoctoral Training Program in Behavioral and Psychosocial Aspects of Cancer Prevention and Control and has been primary mentor for 22 individual mentored career development awards. Her NIH-funded learning modules on evidence-based practice (www.ebbp.org) and the science of team science (www.teamscience.net) are freely available online.
Santosh KumarU. of Memphis
Santosh Kumar
U. of Memphis skumar4(at)memphis.eduProfessor of Computer Science, University of Memphis; Director, NIH Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge
Dr. Shetty is a Professor of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. An early mover in the mHealth space, he works on point of care technologies to facilitate informed clinical decision making and population health management. His research program has been funded continuously by NIH since 1993. Beyond his research and clinical roles, he is deeply involved in academic governance, having served as Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research, and a member of UCLA’s central Committee on Academic Personnel that makes the final tenure and promotion recommendations. Dr. Shetty has been a core faculty of the NIH’s mHealth Training Institutes since its inception in 2011 and also directs the training core of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge.
Faculty
Nabil AlshurafaNorthwestern
Nabil Alshurafa
Northwestern nabil(at)northwestern.eduAssistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Northwestern University
Nabil Alshurafa is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and of Computer Science at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2015, where his dissertation was awarded the Computer Science outstanding graduating student award, and the Symantec outstanding research award. In 2015, Popular Science magazine highlighted his research on designing a wearable neck-worn sensor WearSens to distinguish between solid and liquid foods consumed. He currently directs the HABits Lab at Northwestern, which aims to bridge between computer science and behavioral science research. His current research seeks to transform our understanding of health constructs by designing objective verifiable wearable sensor measures, to more effectively design interventions that improve lifestyle habits. In 2018, he was awarded a five-year NIDDK NIH Career award, to develop expertise in obesity-related research and advance passive sensing of problematic eating behaviors. He is currently directing the SenseWhy study, which aims to lay the foundation for studying overeating behaviors among participants with obesity through passive wearable sensors.
Eric HeklerUCSD
Eric Hekler
UCSD ehekler(at)eng.ucsd.eduAssociate Professor, Department of Family Medicine & Public Health, Director, Center for Wireless & Population Health Systems, Faculty, Design Lab & Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego
Dr. Eric Hekler, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the Director of the Center for Wireless & Population Health Systems within the Qualcomm Institute at UCSD, and the faculty member of the Design Lab at UCSD. His research is broadly focused on advancing methods in the design, creation, optimization, evaluation, and reuse (scaling up and out) of digital health technologies. His goal is to contribute towards a form of applied science that facilitates equitable participation, contribution, and benefit for all. There are three interdependent themes to his research, advancing: 1) methods for optimizing adaptive behavioral interventions; 2) methods and processes to help people and communities help themselves: and 3) research pipelines to achieve efficient, rigorous, context-relevant solutions for complex problems, a domain he and his colleagues have called agile science. He has over 100 publications that span the many disciplines he contributes and has an active federal and foundation funding. He is recognized internationally as an expert in the area of digital health.
Benjamin MarlinUMass Amherst
Benjamin Marlin
UMass Amherst marlin(at)cs.umass.eduAssociate Professor, College of Information and Computer Sciences University of Massachusetts Amherst
Benjamin M. Marlin joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. His current research centers on the development of customized probabilistic models and algorithms for time series with applications to the analysis of electronic health records and mobile health data. His recent work includes probabilistic models for analyzing wireless ECG data, detection of cocaine use from wireless ECG, hierarchical activity recognition from on-body sensor data with applications to smoking and eating detection, and methods for mitigating lab-to-field generalization loss in mobile health studies. Marlin is a 2014 NSF CAREER award recipient. His research has also been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the US Army Research Laboratory. Prior to joining UMass Amherst, Marlin was a fellow of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and the Killam Trusts at the University of British Columbia. He completed his PhD in machine learning in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Timothy HnatMD2K
Timothy Hnat
MD2K twhnat(at)memphis.eduChief Software Architect
Dr. Hnat is Chief Software Architect for the MD2K Center. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Memphis. His research interests cover several areas of the construction and evaluation of distributed systems, including compilers, programming languages, networking, and wireless sensor networks. He seeks to harness the potential of distributed systems to affect and interact with the physical world to address mHealth issues.
Benjamin MarlinUCSD
Benjamin Marlin
UCSD nebeker(at)ucsd.eduAssistant Professor, School of Medicine UC San Diego
Dr. Camille Nebeker is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Nebeker is affiliated with the Divisions of Behavioral Medicine and Global Health in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health. She also holds an adjunct faculty appointment with the San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health and is an affiliated investigator with the UC San Diego Research Ethics Program. Dr. Nebeker’s research focuses on the design of research/bioethics educational initiatives designed for traditional and non-traditional learners with a goal of trainee’s understanding and appreciation of factors that influence the ethical and responsible conduct of research. Project BRIC (Building Research Integrity and Capacity), for example, has developed research ethics education for community members who have little/no formal academic research training yet, assist academic researchers to implement community- and clinic-based health research. Dr. Nebeker is also exploring the ethical dimensions of biomedical research (i.e., informed consent, risk assessment, data management) that leverages emerging technologies to collect personal health data (PHD). Dr. Nebeker is project director/principal investigator for the Connected and Open Research Ethics (CORE) initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratory Fellowship program and Project BRIC, which is supported by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Dr. Nebeker’s research has received continuous support from intra/extramural sources since 2002.
Daniel RiveraArizona State University
Daniel Rivera
Arizona State University daniel.rivera(at)asu.eduProfessor of Chemical Engineering, Program Director, Control Systems Engineering Laboratory
Arizona State University
Daniel E. Rivera became part of the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University in the fall of 1990. Prior to joining ASU he was an Associate Research Engineer in the Control Systems Section of Shell Development Company. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively. He has been a visiting researcher with the Division of Automatic Control at Linköping University, Sweden, Honeywell Technology Center, the University "St. Cyril and Methodius" in Skopje, Macedonia, the National Distance Learning University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain, and the University of Almería in Andalucía, Spain.
His research interests include the topics of robust process control, system identification, and the application of control engineering principles to problems in process systems, supply chain management, and prevention and treatment interventions in behavioral medicine. Dr. Rivera was chosen as 1994-1995 Outstanding Undergraduate Educator by the ASU student chapter of AIChE, and was a recipient of 1997-1998 Teaching Excellence Award awarded by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at ASU. In 2007, Dr. Rivera was awarded a K25 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health to study control systems approaches for fighting drug abuse. The following ASU news article describes some of the NIH grants funding this work and related research in optimized behavioral interventions: https://research.asu.edu/stories/read/fighting-addiction-algorithms.
Predrag Klasnja, Ph.D.U. of Michigan
Predrag Klasnja, Ph.D.
U. of Michigan klasnja(at)umich.eduAssistant Professor of Information, School of Information, Assistant Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan
Predrag (Pedja) Klasnja is an assistant professor at the School of Information and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Michigan Interactive & Social Computing group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in human-computer interaction and social computing. Dr. Klasnja received a PhD in information science from the Information School at the University of Washington. He then served as a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington. Dr. Klasnja joined the SI faculty in July 2012, and his areas of interest include human-computer interaction, health informatics, and mobile computing.
Inbal Nahum-ShaniU. of Michigan
Inbal Nahum-Shani
U. of Michigan inbal(at)umich.eduAssociate Professor, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Her research integrates Occupational Health Psychology and Quantitative Psychology to (a) develop technology-based supportive interventions for reducing stress and preventing problem behaviors among young adults and employed individuals; and (b) building adaptive interventions that are delivered via mobile devices and that provide support in real-time to people as they go about their daily lives (Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions). She is a founding member and co-director of the d3lab (Data Science for Dynamic intervention Decision-making lab) at the University of Michigan.
Carolyn Yoon, Ph.D.U. of Michigan
Carolyn Yoon, Ph.D.
U. of Michigan yoonc(at)umich.eduProfessor, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Carolyn Yoon is Professor of Marketing at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and a Faculty Associate at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Her research seeks to advance our understanding of psychological and neural mechanisms underlying judgment and decision processes across the lifespan, especially in consumer contexts and across different social and cultural environment. She takes a multi-level and multi-systems approach to elucidate basic processing mechanisms that lead to specific behavioral outcomes in domains involving decision making, health, consumption, well-being, and prosocial behavior. In her work, she explicitly considers the interplay between biology, environment, and behavior in order to develop theoretical insights that also have meaningful implications for consumers, practitioners, and public policymakers. She has published widely in top journals in marketing, psychology, and the neurosciences, and serves on numerous editorial boards. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and currently serves as a Board Member of the Association for Consumer Research.
Guy EldredgeAmazon Web Services
Guy Eldredge
Amazon Web Services guyeld(at)amazon.comSoftware Engineer, Educational Lead, Amazon Web Services
Mr. Eldredge is a software engineer/educational lead for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and focuses on educational and healthcare groups. His key responsibilities are to educate biomedical researchers how to harness the power of commercial cloud computing and to avail of the reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services provided by AWS. In particular, he highlights AWS's wide range of services, including data analytics and machine learning as well as the attendant security and privacy controls that are essential for mHealth clinical studies.
Dana LewisOpeningPathways.org
Dana Lewis
OpeningPathways.org danamichellelewis(at)gmail.comOpenAPS,org, OpeningPathways.org
After building her own DIY “artificial pancreas,” Dana Lewis helped found the open source artificial pancreas movement (known as “OpenAPS”), making safe and effective artificial pancreas technology available (sooner) for people with diabetes around the world. She is a passionate advocate of patient-centered, -driven, and -designed research. Rather than coming from a traditional engineering background, Dana brings together a mix of technical and communication skills and a unique perspective to focus on bringing together individuals regardless of their traditional “role” in healthcare. She is an experienced community builder and facilitator and has taken a leadership role in a number of research projects that bring together diverse perspectives (academic, industry, government, and patient communities, to name a few). She is currently collaborating with, PI, or co-PI on research projects with different teams from MIT, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Arizona State University, and others around the world. These teams bring together computer and data scientists, healthcare providers, economists, social and behavioral scientists, and others alongside patients to study the different ramifications of projects in open source, patient-led communities. Most notably, she currently serves as Principal Investigator for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded grant project called “Opening Pathways” (OpeningPathways.org) to learn more about patient-led innovation and scientific discovery, and scale it in additional patient communities.