Events

We had 110 people at our retreat held on 10/22/2024 at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science! We decided to kick off with a fun tournament of research Pictionary, followed by a 3 hours block to explore the museum, visit two poster sessions, and get some lunch. We then hosted a panel discussion on Diverse Career Paths where our invited department alumni discussed current trends and details of their professional successes.

Research Pictionary
Table 1 won this round robin tournament and are awarded an all-expenses paid dinner with our Chair, Dr. Gaudenz Danuser.
Members: Anteneh Godana, Averi Perny, Bingying Chen, Bo-Jui Chang, Chinthak Murali, David Hein, Derek Abbott, Devin O'Kelly, James Elder, Kseniia Dudnyk, Philip Brown. 

Poster Sessions
The following four individuals are awarded up to $800 each towards travel costs for presenting their research at any scientific meeting in 2025.
We had a Best Presenter Award per session based on the comprehensibility of research presented, overall look and flow of the poster/presentation, and questions answered satisfactorily.
We introduced a new Award this time for Best Attendee to encourage deeper critical thinking about the research being presented, with the objective of inspiring novel collaboration ideas.
Session 1
Best Presenter: Aixa Andrade Hernandez
Best Attendee: Ruheng Wang
Session 2
Best Presenter: Kaitlin Trenfield
Best Attendee: Shiqiu Yu

Scavenger Hunt
We held a scavenger hunt where everyone was invited to visit exhibits on levels 2-4 of the museum to fill out a crossword puzzle. 
Winner: Hallie Nell

Panel Discussion on Diverse Career Paths hosted by our department alumni
Dr. Yusuf Tamer (Principal Data & Applied Scientist, Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI)
Dr. Xinxin Wang (Assistant Professor, University of Tulsa)
Dr. Devin O’Kelly (Senior Ai-HPC Cluster Engineer, NVIDIA)
Dr. Peng Lian (Principle Site Reliability Engineer, Oracle)

Wishing Rebekah well
We celebrated our former Department Administrator, Rebekah Craig's career move with some nostalgic words from our Chair and a gift from the entire department.

We wrapped up the retreat with words from our Chair, looking forward to our 10th Anniversary next year!

Interdiciplinary keywords - what do they mean to you?

The Women in Art committee under UTSW’s Women’s Alliance BRG hosted an hour of creative exploration with the Women in Computational Biology group from the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics on October 11th, 2024.

Attendees were read common scientific terms and given two minutes to express their interpretation of the word through art.

The artwork is on permanent display in the hallway of the 9th floor of the Moss Clinical Science Building (J) on UT Southwestern’s South Campus.

UTSW AI Innovations Challenge

The Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics & Office for Technology Development put together a pioneering event designed to spur innovation and practical AI applications in the life sciences, biotech, and healthcare sectors at UT Southwestern. Innovators were invited to submit proposals of an idea/technology/app they wished to develop between April and June. Three finalist teams and projects were selected for the AI challenge:

Team 1: MEDBOX
MedBox: A Fully Localized Solution for Healthcare AI
MEdBox is an automated grading and feedback assistant for medical education programs and simulation centers. The product includes an institutionally-tailored custom hardware-software “box” of pre-curated pipelines deploying large language models.

Team 2: Umed Imaging
Universal Modality Translation Model for Medical Imaging
UMed Imaging is a deep learning model that seamlessly converts medical images across multiple modalities like CT, MRI, and PET. This minimizes radiation exposure & need for multiple scans. Our innovation can streamline radiotherapy processes and lower healthcare costs.

Team 3: Phixer
Phixer: A Streamlined Approach to Primary Care with AI
Phixer can enhance primary care visits by using AI-powered conversation analysis and diagnostic support to summarize doctor-patient interactions and provide real-time insights. This reduces the documentation burden on physicians and improves diagnostic accuracy, leading to better patient outcomes.

Between July 1 and August 30, 2024, they attended several talks from UTSW personnel, industry partners, commercialization partners, and regulatory entities to gain experience about bringing their idea to market; all while working with Amazon Web Services to get started on the programming of their tool/app.

Team Phixer won Best Pitch at the final presentation event on 8/29/2024. Until May 2025, the three teams are working to bring their applications to beta-testing levels.

Read the full story here: Pitching to the Limits of Artificial Intelligence.