Institute for Visualization & Perception Research

Research Assistant

Kat is currently a graduate student working towards her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology. She earned her B.S. in Biology (Bioinformatics) from UMass Lowell and a Master’s Degree in Bioinformatics from Boston University. Subsequently she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital studying various aspects of Huntington's disease. In 2011, Kat re-joined the IVPR where she is pursuing her interest in visualizing trends in another, more common neurodegenerative disorder - Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Email: eekaterina_galkina@student.uml.edu

Sebastin Kolman 

Research Assistant

Interests: Information Visualization, Web Technologies

Sebastin earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University and came to University of Massachusetts Lowell to do his Masters in Computer Science in 2006. After graduating in 2007 he worked at IBM as a Software Engineer for 2 years. He returned to UMass Lowell and joined the Institute of Visualization and Perception Research lab as a Research Assistant in 2009. He is currently enrolled in the Doctoral program and his research activities include information visualization and web technologies. 

Email: saby83@gmail.com 

Research Assistant

Research interests: Universal Usability, User Studies, Assistive devices, Visualization, Natural Language Generation, ADA

Heather is currently a doctoral student working toward her Ph.D. in Computer Science. She has been working with the IVPR since the summer of 2008 and has participated in a variety of research projects, including the VAST Challenges, breast cancer risk modeling, Weave user interface development and participant studies, and most recently a user interface for accessibility support for visualizations with assistive devices. Heather speaks publicly at many events, mentoring younger women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.  She is also involved in a number of student groups including Women in Computer Science and the Computer Science Graduate Student Organization, among others. 

Email: hgranz@cs.uml.edu

Scholarly Interests: Collaboration and Text-based Visualizations

John is currently an undergraduate student working towards a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. In June 2010 he began work as a research assistant in the IVPR . His work focused on website management. He has also contributed to the VAST 2011 Challenge and to the development of Weave.

Email: John_Fallon@student.uml.edu

Research Assistant 

Scholarly interests: Visualization, accessibility systems, bioinformatics

Merve is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science with Bioinformatics specialization at U Mass Lowell. She began work with IVPR in June 2012 and has been contributing to the ADA(American Disabilities Act) project adding disability options to WEAVE so that visually impaired people can benefit from visualization platforms. She also participates in development and improvement of WEAVE tools. Her research interests include visualization platforms, accessibility systems and bioinformatics. 

E-mail: merve_tuccar@student.uml.edu

Scholarly Interests: Visualization, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence 

Research interests: visualization, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is currently working on text analysis for weave.

Baochen is currently a third year Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at UMass Lowell. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Shandong University, China. 

Email: bsun@cs.uml.edu

Scholarly Interests: Bioinformatics, self-organization and complexity in living systems, visualization of information propagation within evolutionary processes 

Miriam is a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology program at UMass Lowell, with a specialization in Bioinformatics.  She received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of New Hampshire, and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Massachusetts.  She has a background in actuarial science and is a member of the Casualty Actuarial Society.  As part of the IVPR group, Miriam’s research will include the application of visual techniques to explore the behavior of biological systems.

Shweta Purushe 

Research Assistant

Scholarly interests: Intersection of labor markets and education, labor economics, sustainable development

Michael earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics in 2010 and a Master’s Degree in Economic and Social Development of Regions in 2012, both from UMass Lowell. He is also the recipient of the 2012 Outstanding Graduate Student Award for the Economic and Social Development of Regions Master’s Program. During his time as an undergraduate, he helped to form UMass Lowell’s first team to perform in the regional Federal Reserve Challenge and was an active member of the team for two years (2008, 2009). As a graduate student, he was a research assistant for Prof. William Mass where his work centered on developing a metric for understanding the alignment of postsecondary degree production and job openings across occupational fields. Michael also utilized Weave to visualize socioeconomic data at various geographic levels. He is currently working with Prof. Mass to further develop the workforce alignment metric and using Weave to visualize our data.

e-mail: dinardi.michael@gmail.com

Research assistant 

Scholarly interests: Visualization, Bioinformatics, Design patterns

Sanjay is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UMass Lowell. He earned an M.S. in Computer Science from UMass Lowell and B.Tech in Biotechnology from Arunai Engineering College, Anna University, India.  He works as research assistant in the IVPR lab where his work focuses on extending the Weave Visualization platform for the Biology community. Sanjay’s research interests include visualization, Bioinformatics and Design patterns.

Email: sanjay_anbalagan@student.uml.edu

Scholarly Interests: Visualization, Text analysis, and Bioinformatics

Yen-Fu is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UMass Lowell. He earned a B.S. and an M.S. in Bioengineering from Tatung University, Taiwan. He worked on targeted tumor radioimmuntherapy at the National Health Research Institute, Taiwan. After receiving informatics training at the Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan, Yen-Fu worked at Acer as a software programmer and was responsible for the NTU Hospital Health Management Center system development and maintenance. He has worked with Professor Grinstein on the VAST Challenge 2011 and on development of Weave, a web-based analysis and visualization platform. His current research interests include visualization, text analysis and bioinformatics.

Email: yenfu_luo@student.uml.edu

Stavros is currently a graduate student in the Economic and Social Development of Regions Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He completed undergraduate work at UMass earning a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Applied Physics, and a Bachelor of Art in Political Science.

Scholarly interests :  Visualization, Lifelines, Bioinformatics

Aicha is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She received her Bachelors in computer Science with honors from the University of Sciences in Monastir (FSM, Tunisia). She then earned a Masters in Computer Science from University of Sciences in Tunis (FST, Tunisia) where she worked as a research assistant at the 'Laboratoire d'Informatique Productique et de Parellelism' (LIP2). In parallel with Masters,  Aicha worked as a full time lecturer and lab instructor at National Engineering College in Monastir (ENIM) teaching C programming and Artificial Intelligence and managed research credit projects for electrical engineering undergrads. Aicha joined the IVPR in 2012 to focus on doctoral research in visualization and data analysis.