Head, Biostatistics Section, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, the Lerner Research Institute of the Cleveland Clinic.

Farren Briggs, PhD, ScM, is an assistant professor in the Department of Population and Quantititative Health Sciences, at CWRU's School of Medicine. He is an epidemiologist with an emphasis in genetic and environmental epidemiology. His experience includes investigating multiple facets of the etiology, pathology, and manifestation of chronic diseases by designing and using diverse study designs, resources, and methodological approaches.

Dr. Briggs’ research is primarily focused on phenotyping multiple sclerosis at the micro- to macro-level, including profiling biomarkers, multimorbidity, quality of life, and physical/mental impairments, in addition to characterizing the role of genetic, environmental, gene x environment, metabolomic, lifestyle/behavioral, and comorbidity variation in multiple sclerosis pathophysiology. Dr. Briggs is actively applying his methodological experience to other complex neurological and inflammatory diseases, including epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, neuromyelitis optica, inflammatory bowel disease, and atopic dermatitis.

Mark Cameron, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Population and Quantitatve Health Sciences in CWRU's School of Medicine. He applies genomic technologies and bioinformatic methods to identify biomarkers (immune correlates) of infectious diseases, such as the novel coronavirus, HIV, and chronic inflammatory conditions, such as psoriasis. He and his team have broad computational expertise in analyzing across data types and studies, and focus their work on targets or diagnostics that can be used in specific immunotherapy or vaccine design.

Dr. Cameron also directs the genomics activities of several large cores or consortia, including the CWRU Applied Functional Genomics Core, the Miami Center for AIDS Research (Inter-CFAR) Bioinformatics Core, the CWRU CFAR Systems Biology Core, and the international Early Treated Perinatally Infected individuals: Improving Children’s Lives with an HIV Vaccine (EPIICAL). These collaborative cores allow Dr. Cameron to apply his systems approach and data from gene sequence, to gene transcription, to protein, cellular and antibody function, to find out what goes right or wrong in the immune systems of patients who respond variably to various diseases or treatments. Most recently, Dr. Cameron is part of an international collaboration developing a rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2.

Jessica Cooke Bailey, PhD, MA, is an assistant professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with CWRU's School of Medicine. Her research has focused on applying sophisticated statistical methods to understand the genetic basis of glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration in European Americans, including the Amish. Dr. Cooke Bailey is now expanding her work to harness the power of electronic health record (EHR) data coupled with genomics and other “omics” data to understand why African Americans are at increased risk for glaucoma compared with other populations. Understanding glaucoma risk factors will begin to address health disparities with the goal of informing treatment options.

Colin Drummond, PhD, MBA, is a professor and the assistant chair of CWRU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, with a secondary appointment in the Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics in the School of Medicine. He also serves as a research professor in the Department of Urology. Dr. Drummond’s research focuses on healthcare IT, sports health analytics, and wearable sensor systems. He has conducted research in the areas of medical device design, microfabrication packing, sensor systems, and cross-platform software systems integration. This builds on two decades of work in the application of science and technology to the creation of products and services.

Dr. Drummond was the director of clinical research for non-acute medical products at Invacare Corporation, specializing in respiratory therapy (principally oxygen therapy) and sleep disorder research. Prior to that, he was the manager of marketing and business development for the Powder Systems Group at the Nordson Corporation, focusing on product development, international high-technology manufacturing coating system start-ups, and e-business initiatives. Earlier, he spent eight years at the NASA Lewis Research Center developing programming techniques for complex aircraft system analysis and turbomachinery stability.

Mark Griswold, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Radiology at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine and University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, with secondary appointments in CWRU's Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Physics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. With an imaging research lab located within the clinical space at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Dr. Griswold advances Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) science with immediate field-level input from radiologists and clinicians to validate and refine research concepts and initial results. Dr. Griswold is known for his research in developing fast MRI methods as well as a highly quantitative and objective measurement of tissue states called Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF).

Dr. Griswold is also the Faculty Director of the Interactive Commons (IC), an institute that focuses on developing inventive solutions from a collaborative model that has shown the value of combining expertise from divergent fields. The IC provides structure, personnel, and technology to bring people together, change perspectives and solve big problems. The IC features the Microsoft HoloLens mixed-reality headset, which is being used to teach courses and drive research throughout Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic.

Ming Hu, PhD, is as assistant staff member with the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. His focus is on the development of statistical methods and computational tools, and their applications to genetic and epigenetic studies. Dr. Hu's recent work is on genome-wide mapping and analysis of chromosome architecture. He has developed data normalization methods widely used in the analysis of genome-wide chromatin interactomic data. He also has developed methods for inteferring three-dimensional chromatin organization and its dynamics, detecting long-range chromatin interactions, and jointly analysing compendium of chromatin interactomic data.

Dr. Hu worked on a compendium of chromatin contact maps across 21 human cell lines and primary tissues, which was selected as a research highlight by Nature Reviews Genetics. He also developed MAPS, a model-based method to identify long-range chromatin interactions from various experiments on which he has collaborated. Additionally, he has developed novel methods for analyzing various types of sequencing data. As a biostatistician, he has contributed to multiple clinical studies in the area of emergency medicine and ophthalmology.

Tae Hyun Hwang, PhD, is an assistant staff member of the Lerner Research Institute with the Cleveland Clinic. His research focuses on developing novel macine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and computational/bioinformatics algorithms and tools to gain new insights about the genetic/phenotypic variants of human disease. Dr. Hwang's current work is in developing new machine learning and AI algorithms and bioinformatics approaches to integrate large-scale genomic, single-cell sequencing, genetics, phenotypic, interactome (protein-protein interaction) networks, image and clinical data - including electronic health records - to discover the genetic variants that might be used clinically to guide therapy decisions.

David Kaelber, MD, PhD, MPH, MS, FAAP, FACP, FACMI is a practicing internist and pediatrician and the first Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Vice-President of Health Informatics of the MetroHealth System, the public healthcare system for Cleveland, which is affiliated with Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine.  He also is a professor of Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with  CWRU's School of Medicine.

Dr. Kaelber is the founding Director of MetroHealth’s Center for Clinical Informatics Research and Education and the Center for Health Informatics and Patient Engagement, as well as founding Fellowship Director of Case Western Reserve University's (MetroHealth) ACGME accredited Clinical Informatics Fellowship. Dr. Kaelber was in the first group of physician informaticists to become board certified in Clinical Informatics in 2013.

His areas of interest and research include personal health records, electronic health records, clinical decision support, health information exchange, telehealth, the teaching of medical informatics to medical students, resident physicians and fellows, using "big data" and electronic health records for chronic disease detection and management, and other areas of clinical informatics, as well as research in med-peds, a combined specialty of internal medicine and pediatrics.

Mehmet Koyuturk, PhD, is the Andrew R. Jennings Professor of Computing Sciences in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences in CWRU’s School of Engineering. His research is on the development of algorithms for large-scale data mining and analysis, with particular emphasis on networks and graph-structured data, applied to biological systems. Dr. Koyuturk's focus is on analyzing biological networks and transforming "omic" data into knowledge in the context of systems biology, with translational applications in cancer, pre-term birth, and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Koyuturk also serves on the steering committee for graduate programs in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics (SYBB), in CWRU’s School of Medicine.

Dr. Koyuturk is a Wallace H. Coulter Fellow, a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), from which he received the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biological Society (EMBS) award for technical achievements in computational imaging and digital pathology.

Thomas LaFramboise, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences with the CWRU School of Medicine. He also is a member of the GI Cancer Genetics Program with the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, housed at CWRU. Dr. LaFramboise is focused on developing and applying computational tools to identify molecular variants - both inherited and somatic - that contribute to cancer and related diseases in humans.

His research has centered on the statistical modeling of data from SNP microarrays to detect DNA copy number changes in tumors, and he has written a number of R software packages designed to draw biological inferences from genomic data. His research group is developing and applying methods to mine high-dimensional data sets, with the goal of generating hypotheses regarding gene function in tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis, which are then tested in the laboratory using human cancer cells.

Jing Li, PhD, is the Leonard Case Jr. Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Computer and Data Sciences at CWRU's School of Engineering. He is also a member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Center of Proteomics and Bioinformatics. Dr. Li’s research interests include bioinformatics and computational biology, data science, machine learning, and data mining, with a particular emphasis on the design and application of efficient combinatorial and statistical algorithms to solve challenging biological or data mining problems.

His earlier work mostly focused on computational genomics including genomic variations analysis for the identification of disease genes and integrative omics data analysis for computational drug prediction. More recently, Dr. Li developed novel algorithms for recommender systems that have broad applications in many fields. Dr. Li’s research activities are well documented in more than ninety peer reviewed journals and conference publications in top bioinformatics and data mining venues.

Daniel M. Rotroff, PhD, is an assistant staff member of the Lerner Research Institute with the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Rostroff uses a wide-range of computational and experimental approaches to leverage 'omics' technologies and electronic health records (EHR) to investigate many aspects of precision medicine, such as biomarker or risk allele discovery for drug response and disease outcomes. Dr. Rotroff is a KL2 scholar and has received funding to develop methods that use genomic and clinical data to identify high-risk subtypes within type 2 diabetes. Other funded projects include the interaction of genomic, behavioral, and microbiome factors into a risk model for onset of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and the use of breath-based metabolomics as a screening tool for chronic liver diseases and hepatocellular carcinoma.

Frederick (Fred) Schumacher, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, with CWRU's School of Medicine. He also serves as the chair of the department's graduate program curriculum committee and serves on the department's PhD admissions committee. He also is the co-leader of the Cancer Prevention Control & Population Research Program, at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. As a genetic epidemiologist, Dr. Schumacher’s research interests are in three major areas: deciphering the inherited genetic architecture of complex traits; assessing the shared genetic etiology of complex phenotypes to elucidate the underlying biology; and determining the clinical impact of inherited variation.

His primary research focus is on cancer, particularly prostate cancer. He is an international leader in the study of the role of germline genetics in cancer susceptibility and progression. For more than a decade, he has led large multi-study consortia within and across cancers (i.e. Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium, NCI GAME-ON, etc.). These consortia have enabled the discovery of cancer genetic risk factors, the generalizability of genetic effects among non-European ancestral populations, and the evaluative utility of genetics in cancer risk prediction.

Xiaofeng Zhu, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences with CWRU's School of Medicine. Dr. Zhu has developed many statistical methods in the areas of association analysis, population stratification and admixture mapping, and has had extensive experience in the design and analysis of genetic studies over the past 20 years. He and his colleagues suggested using principal components to summarize the genetic background information provided by a set of independent markers, this information to be used in association mapping for both quantitative and qualitative traits. Together with his colleagues, he performed the first admixture mapping study using microsatellite markers.

His group has developed several novel statistical methods to identify rare variants, contributing to the understanding of phenotypic variations. His group also developed cross-phenotype association (CPASSOC) that can integrate association evidence from summary statistics of multiple traits, either correlated or independent, continuous or binary, coming from the same or different studies. He leads the Continental Origins and Genetic Epidemiology Network (COGENT) consortium, and has identified multiple loci associated with blood pressure traits in African-Ancestry population. He and his colleagues have also identified many genetic loci associated with sleep disorders.