Welcome to the April 2014 IEEE Life Sciences eNewsletter
This month we bring you a variety of articles we think you will find interesting and useful. First, we feature an interview with Dr. Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer, a practicing MD who works closely with engineers in studies of the safety of medical devices. In addition, we present an overview of a Healthcare Symposium that focused on bringing new technologies into medical practice. We have an article on the promises of Big Data Analytics in the detection and treatment of Cardiovascular Disease. And we have a report on a novel glove technology that can help people with hearing disabilities to communicate.
Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer, MD, MPA, is Medical Director of Loyola University Health System's Occupational Health Services, and Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Dr. Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer guides Loyola's occupational medicine programs. An IEEE Fellow and global consultant regarding electrical safety, she is widely recognized for her work on risk mitigation in complex systems. 
Emily Sopensky co-founded the RFID in Healthcare Consortium in 2008 as an educational not-for-profit addressing technology primarily in healthcare facilities. Initially created 5 years ago by the RHCC, 2014 is the first year the Symposium has substantial IEEE involvement (Life Sciences and Engineering Medicine and Biology Society). As an active IEEE volunteer and Chair-Elect, IEEE Technical Committee on RFID (CRFID), she anticipates next year's symposium will similarly have active IEEE participation. 
Kuldeep Singh V Rajput is a Project Associate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He received the B. Tech degree from the B.V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology. His research interests are in the field of VLSI, Computer Vision and Graphics, Haptics, Signal Processing, Biomedical Engineering and Biosensors. 
Po-Yen Wu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include (1) designing novel methodologies to improve the data analysis pipeline for RNA-sequencing data, (2) exploring data-mining techniques for extracting meaningful patterns in electronic health records, and (3) integrating information from RNA-sequencing data and electronic health records to improve the prediction performance of clinical endpoints. 
Janani Venugopalan is a Ph.D. student in the Joint Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on health informatics. Her research focuses on clinical decision making using HER data, which are currently in collaboration with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory. 
Sonal Kothari received her Ph.D. degree in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow working under Principle Investigator May D. Wang in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Her research interests are in the areas of imaging informatics, histopathological image analysis, pattern recognition, and visualization. 
Chanchala D. Kaddi is currently a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research interests are in computational systems biology and bioinformatics, including methods for mass spectrometry imaging data analysis and predictive models for cancer research. 
Chih-Wen Cheng is currently pursuing his Ph.D. as a graduate research assistant in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on applying data mining, cloud computing, and mobile technologies to improve clinical decision-making to facilitate quality-of-healthcare. 
John H. Phan is an assistant research professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He received his Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. His research is focused on knowledge-driven high-throughput analysis of biomedical data, high-performance and grid computing, and integrative bioinformatics. 
May Wang is an Associate Professor in the Joint Department of BME, School of ECE, The Winship Cancer Institute, IBB, and IPaT at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, USA. She is a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scholar, Director of the Biocomputing and Bioinformatics Core in Emory-GeorgiaTech Cancer Nanotechnology Center, and Co-Director of Georgia-Tech Center of Bio-Imaging Mass Spectrometry. Prof. Wang's research is on Big Biomedical Data Analytics with a focus on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) for Personalized and Predictive Health. It includes high throughput next generation sequencing and -omic data mining to identify clinical biomarkers, pathological imaging informatics, health informatics, bionanoinformatics, and systems modeling.