Bridging Public Health with Clinical Decisions from a Data Centric Perspective

Jiaming Cui
Virginia Tech CS

Time: 2025-10-15, 12:00 - 13:00 ET
Location: Rice 540 and Zoom

Abstract Public health and clinical decisions are intertwined.  Public health crises place a high burden on healthcare facilities, forcing them to make decisions such as maintaining quality verses treating more people.  Meanwhile, sub-optimal clinical decisions also cause downstream effects on communities.  For example, discharging patients too early may increase disease spread.  Dr. Cui’s work brings a data-centric perspective to bridge clinical decisions within the context of infectious diseases for public health.  His work addresses multiple challenges arising from effectively utilizing rich clinical datasets and issues stemming from the complexity of disease spread dynamics in healthcare facilities.  This talk will cover methods developed to address these challenges with better-designed models to optimize disease surveillance and control policy and new techniques for end-to-end learning with mechanistic epidemiological models.  There are new challenges and opportunities to be discussed in infectious diseases and pandemic response for computer scientists, epidemiologists, and computational biologists.

Bio: Jiaming is an assistant professor in Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. My research aims to bridge AI with clinical decisions and focuses on machine learning, large language models, data mining, graph neural networks, scientific modeling, and public health. I finished my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2024 (advisor: Prof. B. Aditya Prakash). I was also a postdoctoral research associate in the Biocomplexity Institute at University of Virginia (supervisors: Prof. Anil Vullikanti and Prof. Gregory Madden). Before this, I completed my undergraduate studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, where I received my Bachelor’s degrees in both Information Engineering and Finance and graduated with honors.