About
Research Interests: Explainable AI, health informatics, bioinformatics, and AI in education.
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), where I have been teaching since 2017. I earned my PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2017 and my Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Tribhuvan University (ACEM), Nepal. One of my notable contributions in academic research is DNCON2, a method I developed for predicting protein inter-residue contacts. When it was published in 2017, DNCON2 was state-of-the-art and one of the first methods to leverage convolutional deep neural networks.
In subsequent years, my research garnered support from NVIDIA, Google, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Within the field of AI, I have developed a particular interest in explainable AI—a subfield dedicated to uncovering the reasoning behind AI’s successes and failures. I often describe this as the pursuit of “understanding the logic behind the magic of AI.”
More recently, my research interests have expanded to include AI applications in health informatics and education. In 2023, I launched Process Feedback, a new educational tool designed to foster self-reflection, metacognition, and academic integrity among students. This tool, particularly relevant in the new AI era, was highlighted by UMSL Daily and Missouri Online.
Currently, I am actively engaged in four key areas of research: explainable AI, health informatics, bioinformatics, and AI in education. A consistent source of inspiration in my work is Richard Hamming’s seminal talk, You and Your Research.
At UMSL, I teach a variety of courses focused on AI. These include Introduction to AI, Introduction to Deep Learning, and Interpretable Machine Learning, a graduate-level course. Among them, my favorite is Data Visualization.
I would like to express my gratitude to all the remarkable individuals who have supported me in the past or continue to be my source of energy and inspiration.
Select Professional Activities
- 2022 - present, University Ambassador, NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute
- 2019 - present, Senior Member, IEEE
Select Awards
- 2024, Outstanding Teaching Award, Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
- 2022, Outstanding Research Award, Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
- 2015, Oral Presentation Student Award (1st place), 12th annual MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference, Little Rock, USA.
Office Address
Room 312, 3rd floor in Express Scripts Hall (ESH Building).
Contact
Mailing Address
1 University Blvd. 312 Express Scripts Hall
St. Louis, MO 63121