Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Jean Gao wants to know what makes people tick; well, physiologically anyway. Her specialty is bioinformatics, which Wikipedia describes as “the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.”
Whew.
“It’s really just applying computational algorithms to learning, mining and modeling biomedical data,” said Dr. Gao. “Bioinformatics approaches will enlighten knowledge discoveries in ways that visual inspection or simple calculation can’t. The ultimate mission is to advance current understanding of basic medicine, provide early stage diagnosis and monitor disease prognosis.”
Dr. Gao received a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the Shanghai Medical University, a six-year interdisciplinary program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She was a research and instrument design engineer for four years in China before coming to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree, also in biomedical engineering, at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Dr. Gao then took a different approach, earning a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Purdue.
“During my years of university and industry experience, I became fascinated by the wide areas and diverse topics in biomedical engineering,” she said. “The interdisciplinary nature of biomedical engineering motivated me to go deeper in certain areas and directions. That brought me to computer science; it’s needed for handling broad biomedical computational problems.”
After arriving at UT Arlington in 2003, it didn’t take long for people to recognize her ambitious enthusiasm for teaching and her outstanding research accomplishments. In 2006, the National Science Foundation selected her to receive one of their prestigious early career development (CAREER) grants, valued at more than $558,000. The five-year grant allowed her to study four-dimensional, sub-cellular structure tracking and modeling for cell dynamics.
“New discoveries in biology have required an extensive knowledge of cell dynamics. Knowledge of subcellular particles is critical to understand how cells regulate the delivery of specific proteins from the site of synthesis to the site of action. This will eventually lead to a better understanding of conditions such as diabetes and high cholesterol and of many viral infections. This project develops a unique, and the first, web-based, open access intra-cellular dynamics analysis system for automating subcellular particle motion estimation, tracking and mobility analysis.”
In the following year, Dr. Gao received the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Young Faculty Award, which is presented to a tenure-track faculty member who is judged to be the college’s most promising teacher and scholar, based on his or her body of accomplishments since coming to the University.
In addition to her bioinformatics research, Dr. Gao is also interested in computer vision and pattern recognition. “One of my current projects involves designing an assistive device, called IntelligentEyes, to assist the blind and visually impaired (BVI) in their daily lives. My group is developing an efficient vision system using state-of-the-art vision sensors and wireless communication technologies to provide the BVI with the greatest awareness of and accessibility to their daily environments.”
Dr. Gao is also establishing a reputation for excellence outside the University. More than 25 of her papers have been published in professional journals, and she is an editorial board member for the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics.
In addition to devoting much time to her research, Dr. Gao works closely with her students. She has supervised Ph.D. and graduates and is currently supervising four Ph.D. candidates.
“Student mentoring and supervision are rewarding endeavors,” she said with a smile. “It’s amazing to see how much potential a student has during his or her journey of academic pursuit. It brings me much pleasure to observe the learning, growth and success of my students.”
So what are her next endeavors? “Looking to the future, I plan to continue to develop ways to solve computational problems in basic and clinical biomedicine. In the meantime, though, I’ll devote most of my efforts on developing smart assistive devices for the blind community.”
