Meet the Team

Emmanuel Agu is currently a professor in the computer science department at WPI having received his Masters and PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests are in the areas of computer graphics, mobile computing, and wireless networks. He is especially interested in research into how to use a smartphone as a platform to deliver better healthcare. In collaboration with researchers at WPI and at UMass Medical School, he is currently working on NIH-funded research project to create a mobile application for chronic wound care ...

My favorite activities involve guiding students in projects and research. I like to give them independence and to learn from their work. I enjoy challenging them and myself to find better answers, explanations, and solutions. I am very interested in socio-technical systems, such as the healthcare system or the energy delivery system.Over the past years, my research has focused on developing models in support of an improved healthcare delivery system. To this end, I co-founded the Healthcare Delivery Institute (HDI) at WPI, with faculty members from the business school, and from computer ...

I specialize in user experience and decision-making research, focusing on uncovering the intricacies of human cognition to understand the factors that enhance or impede the effective use of information technologies.Since people predominantly use their eyes to process information, I utilize eye-tracking technology to study user reactions to product and service designs. For example, I analyze eye movement data to evaluate user engagement with various content, ranging from embedded information on organizational websites to complex details, such as diagnosis and treatment options, in medical ...

I enjoy teaching at WPI because students bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm to their learning; I am also inspired by their optimism. My teaching also reflects topics that motivate me:  detailed process design in our Industrial Engineering program, exploring the implications of operational excellence in our graduate programs, and advancing health care systems. My research explores the impact of lean improvement methods in healthcare settings, as well as applying work systems and modeling approaches to design more effective healthcare delivery processes. I am also interested in the ...

My research is interdisciplinary and spans the fields of bioinformatics of complex diseases, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. We bring expertise in machine learning, data mining, and massive data analytics to study molecular mechanisms underlying genetic disorders, such as cancer, diabetes, and autism, and deadly infections, such as pandemic flu. Our approaches benefit from integrating multi-omic, systems, and structural biology data. We also develop hardware-optimized algorithms to understand the evolution of animal and plant genomes on the large scale. ...

Christopher R. Lambert, Ph.D. is a Research Associate Professor with appointments both in the Bioengineering Institute and the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. He is the Associate Director of the WPI Bioengineering Institute. He is co-founder of Active Surface Technologies a research company dedicated to the development of specialized molecular films. Professor Lambert earned a Ph.D. from the University of Paisley in Scotland, and spent two years in a post-doctoral position at the Center for Fast Kinetics in Austin, Texas. He then spent five years in Manchester, UK at the Christie ...

Carolina Ruiz is the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Harold L. Jurist ’61 and Heather E. Jurist Dean's Professor of Computer Science. She joined the WPI faculty in 1997. Prof. Ruiz’s research is in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Mining, and their applications to Medicine and Health. She has worked on several clinical domains including sleep, stroke, obesity and pancreatic cancer. Prof. Ruiz and her research group have developed novel, high-performing machine learning methods, including deep learning networks, for analyzing physiological sleep data; and machine ...

WPI provides an environment that values both teaching and research, which is ideal for me. I enjoy teaching at WPI because students are interested in learning and willing to work hard. My teaching focuses on how business, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations can best use computing technologies, such as database systems, electronic health records systems, and mobile apps. Students in my classes learn to design computing applications that meet the needs of organizations. Students understand the value of learning these topics, and as a result, they work hard to learn the principles and how to ...