Emily Nguyen

PhD Student @ USC - CS B.A. @ UC Berkeley

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Nice To Meet You

Hello, I’m Emily. I am a PhD student at the Melady Lab in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Yan Liu and supported by the NSF GRFP. I’m also working with Professor James Collins in the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Broadly, my research asks: How can AI systems advance human health? To this end, I focus on building multimodal intelligence that can leverage diverse biological data (molecular, genetic, patient records) to improve therapeutic strategies. My work rethinks critical healthcare challenges, from diagnosing diseases to creating new drugs, as problems that AI can effectively help address.

Prior to this, I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science with honors at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, I was an undergrad researcher under the mentorship of Drs. Kristofer Bouchard at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Roy Ben-Shalom at UCSF.

Beyond my academic pursuits, I’m deeply interested and active in computer science education and community service. I have taught in six Berkeley CS courses and faciliated the USC Good Life Discussions. Currently, I’m a mentor for the Google AI Community Project at USC, where we guide URM undergraduates in fostering understanding of AI within the broader campus community. More of my activities can be found in the Mentorship and Outreach tab! I also enjoy figure skating and sunset walks around campus!

I welcome all efforts to get in touch with me

emilyn98 [at] usc [dot] edu

research interests

  • AI: multimodal deep learning, interpretability, transfer learning, generative AI
  • Healthcare Delivery: clinician decision support, precision medicine, drug interactions & discovery
  • Biophysics/Structural Biology: virtual screening, molecular docking, neuronal modeling
  • Computer Vision: digital pathology, pose estimation, behavior quantification

news

Aug 27, 2024 Excited to be part of this USC short film by director Daniel Druhora about our Good Life Discussions!
Aug 26, 2024 Paper on AI-Based Pathomics was accepted to AMIA!
May 15, 2024 Excited to join to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under Prof. Jim Collins!
May 15, 2024 Grateful to be a recipient of the Viterbi Undergraduate Mentoring Award & Excellence in Science Communication for Social Good Award
Mar 8, 2024 Awarded Best Oral Presentation at USC Pathology Conference :D
Jul 10, 2023 First paper of my PhD on Multimodal Deep Learning was accepted to AMIA!
Jun 6, 2023 Local news highlighted our research!
Apr 25, 2023 Honored to be a recipient of the NSF GRFP
Sep 26, 2022 Started my PhD at USC! Fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Yan Liu!

selected publications

2024

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    Oncology Decision Support: AI-Based Pathomics to Identify Platinum-Resistant Epithelial Ovarian Cancer
    Emily Nguyen, Zijun Cui, Joseph Carlson, and Yan Liu
    American Medical Informatics Association Symposium (AMIA), 2024

2023

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    Transferable and Interpretable Treatment Effectiveness Prediction for Ovarian Cancer via Multimodal Deep Learning
    Emily Nguyen, Zijun Cui, Georgia Kokaraki, Joseph Carlson, and Yan Liu
    American Medical Informatics Association Symposium (AMIA), 2023

2022

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    Machine Learning Methods for Supervised Classification of Behavioral Time Series Data
    Emily Nguyen
    University of California, Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (B.A. Honors Thesis), May 2022

2021

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    ReachMaster-3D: An Experimental Platform for Precise 3D Measurement of Whole-Arm Kinematics During Freely-Behaving Reaches in Rats
    Brett Nelson, Shafeeq Ibraheem, Emily Nguyen, and Kristofer Bouchard
    Society for Neuroscience (SfN), May 2021