Joining St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as a Clinical Postdoctoral Researcher

I was awarded the APO Special Postdoctoral Fellowship – a named, institutional fellowship funded by the NIH, awarded each year under the “Academic Programs Special and Endowed Fellowships Program” at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, USA. I officially joined St. Jude as a Clinical Researcher at the Department of Radiology, on Aug.25.2025.

The grant that I had submitted, which got me the NIH-funded APO Special Scholarship awarded, proposes multi-modal and multi-omics techniques to combine different imaging modalities, such that we can develop more targeted treatments for devastating conditions in children. It also proposes several network-based processing to better understand patterns and connectivity in biomedical data, including and especially images.

My background in medical imaging, multi-modal learning, systems and network biology, and single-cell omics (including spatial multi-omics) puts me in a great position to deal with and integrate different types of biomedical data. While integrating and fully utilizing different data modalities holds the promise of more targeted therapies (that is, higher specificity), it also has the potential of adding unnecessary noise if done incorrectly. On the one hand, the aim of modern biomedicine is individualization, on the other hand the challenge is noise removal.

My background in theoretical AI often helps deal with this conundrum. However, even when using AI-based models to integrate data modalities, a certain degree of care must be taken to ensure that we do not run into the (very pervasive) issue of over-training. Data is our greatest friend, it is also our modet formidable foe if not handled correctly.

My welcome message to the Department of Radiology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, USA, Aug.25.2026.

[Article and picture uploaded on: Mar.15.2026]