Six faculty members and five students from the college were awarded support from the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute this semester for projects spanning research engagement and curricula development, and internships in data science. Nearly 100 proposals were submitted from multiple disciplines.
The NMDSI is a partnership among UW-Milwaukee, Marquette University, and Northwestern Mutual that aims to make southeastern Wisconsin a national hub for data science technology and talent development.
The awards were given in three different programs: the Paving ROADS Seed Fund Program, which supports research partnerships; the Pioneer Collaborative Curricula Program, which aims to infuse data science into the curricula, and the Student Research Scholars Program. Read below for a list of awardees in each category.
Paving ROADS Seed Fund
Jake Luo, associate professor, health informatics
“EXCEL-ECG: Building Explainable EHR-Enriched AI for Guideline-Grounded ECG Decision Support.”
Collaborators: Dr. Divyanshu Mohananey (Medical College of Wisconsin)
Ayesha Siddika Nipu, teaching faculty, computer science
“LLM-Enhanced First-Aid Support System for Medical Emergency Recognition and Primary Care.”
Collaborators: Susan McRoy, UWM professor, computer science, and Praveen Madiraju (Marquette)
Habib Rahman, professor and chair, mechanical engineering
“Physics-Grounded Real-to-Sim-to-Policy Framework for Personalized Assistive Robotics Using Vision-Language-Action Models.”
Christine Cheng, associate professor, computer science, collaborator on a project led by Anne Pycha, UWM professor of linguistics
“Linguistics expressions of human-likeness in Large Language Models: An ethical approach.”
Pioneer Collaborative Curricula Program
Nathaniel Stern, professor, art and design/mechanical engineering
“Crafting AI.”
Collaborator: Charlotte Kent (Montclaire State University)
Student Research Scholars Program
Ahmad Momani
Mentor: Mahsa Dabagh, associate professor, biomedical engineering
“AI-Driven Radiomics for Predicting Treatment Response in Breast Cancer Using Dynamic Contrast-Enhancement MR.”
Amirsajjad Taleban
Mentor: Jake Luo, associate professor, health informatics
“Agentic ECG: Clinically Aligned Multi-Agent System for Interpretable 12-Lead ECG Analysis.”
Bhavana Tumakuru Mahesh
Faculty Mentor: Ayesha Siddika Nipu, teaching faculty, computer science
“Integrating EEG and Psychological Profiling for Neuroadaptive Learning Systems.”
Asif Al Zubayer Swapnil
Mentor: Habib Rahman, professor and chair, mechanical engineering
“Exploring Vision-Language-Action Model Integration for Sensor-Augmented Embodied AI.”
Marko Vucelic
Mentor: Brooke Slavens, professor, mechanical engineering
“Auto-Classification of Manual Wheelchair Propulsion Stroke Patterns in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury and Dysfunction Using Machine Learning.”