Doctor of Philosophy in Information Systems

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Meet Some of Our Doctoral Students…

Peng Chu Wenbin Zhang Omini Jademi
Cailing Wong Pooja Parameshwarappa Yili Zhang
Mohammad Alodadi Uchenna Uchidiuno

 


peng_chuPeng Chu

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

Finance and data analyst, with knowledge and enthusiasm in system development and improvement.

What are your current research areas?

Human Information Interaction (HII), Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), and Search engine enhancement and User Interfaces

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

The people. Faculty members are really nice and helpful. Students are from interdisciplinary back ground and collaborate. Oh, we have an awesome Usability lab and two eye-trackers. Check it out!

After graduation, what is next for you?

Continue my developer job for a while and look for an academia position.


cailing_wongCailing Wong

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

I obtained 2 masters and 1 bachelor degree, all in Computer Science.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

I have conducted several research projects during my PhD study, both on campus and during internships. My research projects are user-centric: web spam detection, personalized social recommendation, data stream filtering and summarization, and privacy issues in information sharing.

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

We have great professors working on different areas. The environment of diverse research areas provides a great chance for us to explore more in the technology world.

What is next for you?

I am about to graduate by the end of this semester. I am planning to find a data scientist position in industry.


mohammad_alodadiMohammad Alodadi

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

I received my  bachelor  degree in computer in 2005 from King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia. I  worked subsequently as a high school computer science teacher. I moved to the United States late-2011 in order to pursue my graduate studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). I received my master degree in Information systems in 2014.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

Currently, I am conducting my research in Database/Datamining area under the supervision of Dr. Vandana Janeja. My research is focused on mining textual data in the medical domain, more specifically, in the temporal events sequence mining. Our interest is extracting medical events that are embedded in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) clinical narratives over a period of time in order to be able to capture a sequence of temporal events. Investigating those sequences can derive interesting sequence patterns which can be used further in prediction analytics.

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

In the IS PhD program, there are five subareas from which a PhD student can specialize. This is the best way to get a head start in whatever area you plan on going into. The faculty in the department are actively teaching topics that are tackling today’s challenges in Information systems such as cyber security, health informatics, and artificial intelligent applications. Finally, the availability of well-done infrastructure of the facilities and services helps PhD students by bringing the best research productivity atmosphere.


wenbin_zhangWenbin Zhang

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

I earned my master’s degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland working on the computational and algorithmic issues involved in the study of data science, with emphasis on the principles and models in predicting patient survival.

Tell us about your research and what you like best about UMBC?

As a member of the iSchools Caucus, Information Systems’ strength in technology-based research and capability in analytics and computing are something I’m passionate about and bring me to UMBC.


pooja_parameshwarappaPooja Parameshwarappa

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

I was working as a Junior Research Associate and my primary area was Data Analytics.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

I am currently working on privacy preserving techniques for non-relational data. I have also worked on data summarization for Intrusion Detection Systems and on analytics for health-related datasets.

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

The department in general is very student-friendly. The best part of it is the faculty. They are very approachable and helpful. Also, the labs are well furnished, considering the fact that we spend most of the day (sometimes work overnight!) in the labs.


uchenna_uchidiunoUchenna Uchidiuno

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

Prior to starting my PhD, I obtained my Masters in Health Management Systems at Duquesne University. Following that, I worked as an Analyst at MEDSTAR – Washington Hospital Center in DC. During my time there, I worked various EMR systems and other clinical applications.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

Currently, my research is with the Health IT lab here at UMBC. My research focuses on the aging population and how we can use health information technology to increase patient/provider engagement and coordination. Specifically, focusing on better fall-risk management, as falls in the elderly population are prevalent and the leading cause of emergency room hospital visits, and in some cases death.

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

I like the diversity of research that the professors engage in, and the focus on inter-disciplinary research and collaboration.


omini_jademiOmini Jademi

What was your background before entering the IS PhD program?

I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) degree in Management Information Systems from Covenant University, Nigeria. As an undergraduate student, I tried my hands on research focusing mainly on User Experience (UX) and User Interface design. After my undergraduate degree, I taught high school seniors for a year in a remote village in Nigeria as part of the 1 year compulsory National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) program which is very similar to the Peace

Corp. I earned a Master of Science (M.S.) in Information Systems from UMBC before transitioning into the PhD program. My current research as a PhD student was formed during my Masters program. My research focus was in Data Mining and Analysis, specifically Social Media mining and analytics, where my research sought to monitor and report Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) using social media data.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

My current research area is Health IT. I analyze health data to create technologies that improve quality of health for patients and also improve the quality of health delivery in hospitals and other healthcare establishments.

What do you like best about the IS PhD program at UMBC?

I like that UMBC has lots of competent faculty members carrying out very interesting research. You have the flexibility to try out different research projects to figure out exactly where you fit. The faculty is also supportive and really want to help you get that PhD!


yili_zhangYili Zhang

Background:

Yili Zhang is currently a graduate student doing her PhD in the Health IT Lab at the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. She received her MS degree in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. And she completed her BS degree in Logistic System Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.

Research:

Her research focuses on health data governance, particularly in data cleansing and data versioning. She also built a data quality tool to detect inconsistencies and discrepancies in data.