Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD
(Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Intelligent Systems and Computational Biology, University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine)

Dr.Vanathi Gopalakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She has secondary appointments in the Intelligent Systems Program and the Department of Computational Biology. Her research encompasses the development and application of symbolic, probabilistic and hybrid machine learning techniques to the mining of structural, genomic and clinical databases in order to learn useful, robust models and associations. Gopalakrishnan received her PhD. in Computer Science, and is fundamentally interested in technologies for data mining and discovery that allow the incorporation of prior knowledge. Her current collaborative projects include modeling of protein sequence-structure-function relationships and identification of disease-specific proteomic biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases, lung and breast cancer. She is the recipient of a five-year K25 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Gopalakrishnan also serves as an affiliated faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Research directed by Robert Bowser, PhD. This collaboration resulted in Gopalakrishnan receiving a Pitt Innovator Award in 2006 for successfully licensing technology developed in her and PhD advisor, Prof. Bruce G. Buchanan’s laboratory to a biotech startup company in Pittsburgh called Knopp Neurosciences, Inc. that performs biomarker validation studies. The technology employs rule learning to discover potential disease-specific biomarkers from proteomic mass spectra, and was applied to biomarker discovery from cerebrospinal fluid profiling for detection of ALS.

Between 1996 and 1998, Gopalakrishnan was involved as a co-founder of Intelligent Systems, M.D. (that now forms the nucleus of NASDAQ –listed ICAD) in Clearwater, Florida. This company developed software that performed second reading of digital mammograms to facilitate early detection of breast cancer.