Student Members


Postdoctoral Researcher


Binita Saha

Binita Saha is a Postdoctoral Researcher in VIDA research group at DePaul University. She works on the NSF-funded SCHOLAR Project, a collaboration with the Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) that focuses on advancing human-centered AI approaches to support community health, improve care coordination, and strengthen the connection between health systems and the communities they serve. Her research interests include natural language processing, health informatics, and human-centered design, with a focus on developing transparent and trustworthy AI systems. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at North Dakota State University, where she developed an advanced RAG framework based on quantized inverted indexing and adaptive reasoning to improve the reliability of domain-specific question answering.


Graduate and Undergraduate Students


Charmi Patel

Charmi Patel is a Ph.D. Student in College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul. She is currently a Research Assistant in the Medical Informatics (MedIX) lab. Her research interests are applying Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Her hobbies are Photoshop/Illustrator Designing and Hiking.

Nandhini Gulasingam

Nandhini Gulasingam is a part-time Ph.D. student with research interests in Machine Learning and Visualization. She currently works for the Faculty Scholarship Collaborative (FSC) at DePaul University and is an adjunct faculty member in the college of CDM and LAS where she teaches Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Data Sciences and Statistics. At the FSC, she manages GIS, database, web development and data related projects. Her expertise includes data analysis, GIS and visualization, databases, and web development.

Harsh Padsala

Harsh Padsala is a Master’s student in Data Science at DePaul University. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from PP Savani University. At VIDA Lab, he works on utilizing multimodal models in the VS Edge project and is interested in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). He is passionate about applying AI across different domains and has a strong interest in data structures, algorithms, and competitive programming. Outside academics, he enjoys playing chess and participating in online coding competitions.

Saba Bashir

Saba Bashir is a graduate student in Data Science and a Research Assistant with the VIDA Lab, currently contributing to the VS-EDGE project. Her work focuses on medical image analysis, computer vision, and multimodal deep learning for healthcare applications. She has worked on several AI and data science projects involving cardiac MRI segmentation, automated foot posture assessment, medical object detection, retinal vessel segmentation, predictive modeling, and healthcare data analytics. She is especially interested in explainable AI, medical image segmentation, and deep learning for clinical decision support systems. Saba has industry and research experience in data analytics, machine learning, and healthcare technologies, and has co-authored research publications in medical imaging.

Avni Sanghvi

Avni Sanghvi is a master's student in Data Science at DePaul University, with a bachelor's degree in computer science and over four years of professional experience at Wipro Technologies, where she worked as a Senior Database Administrator. She currently serves as a Research Assistant on the SCHOLAR project, where she applies her technical expertise in data science and machine learning. Avni is passionate about leveraging ML-driven solutions to develop impactful technologies that contribute positively to society.

Huy Quoc Nguyen

Huy Quoc Nguyen is currently pursuing his undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a minor in Software Development. His academic interests extend to the realm of Game Design, an area about which he is deeply passionate. In addition to his enthusiasm for programming, he is an avid reader with a particular fondness for fantasy novels. Among the numerous books he has enjoyed, 'Lord of the Mysteries' holds a special place as his all-time favorite.

Tani Purwat

Tanishka Purwat is an undergrad student pursuing a B.S in Data Science. She is currently a Research Assistant working on the SFF Housing Project at VIDA Lab. Outside of academics, she is President of the Computer Science Society at DePaul and wants to give other STEM-passionate students a platform to showcase their skills. Despite being a vegetarian, she loves to try new restaurants and cuisines. She is a huge cinephile, and her top 3 favourite movies are The Social Network, Fight Club and Tenet.

Lizzy Hardy

Lizzy Hardy is an undergraduate computational neuroscience student at DePaul University with research interests in connectomics, neural computation and the intersection of biological neural systems and artificial intelligence. She is currently working as a research assistant in the VIDA Lab where she works to bridge computational methods with biological neuroscience. Outside of academics Lizzy enjoys art and can often be found at the Art Institute either appreciating artistic genius or studying in the lounge.

Urvi Hathi

Urvi Hathi is a Master's student in Data Science at DePaul University. She is currently a Research Assistant in the VIDA Lab, working on the NSF-funded SCHOLAR Project, a collaboration with the Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) focused on human-centered AI that combines predictive modeling with community health worker insights to predict 30-day hospital readmissions. Her research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and data-driven risk analysis, with applications in medical informatics, robotics, and beyond.



ALUMNI


PhD

  • Mirtha Lucas (2026), Sargent & Lundy
  • Jennifer Piane, Silgan Closures (2024)
  • Amal Almansour, Post-doc at University of Chicago (2024)
  • Yiyang(Ian) Wang, Milwaukee School of Engineering (2023)
  • Priya Deshpande, Marquette University (2021)
  • Alicia Boyd, Post-doc at New York University (2021)
  • Julie Zhang, East-West University, Chicago (2011)
  • Emilia Apostolova, Language.ai (2011)
  • William Horsthemke, Argonne National Lab, Chicago (2010)

Masters

  • Diya Patel
  • Sakshi Gorkhali
  • Rashi Jain
  • Rohan Patil
  • Ankita Mishra
  • Ankita Kshirsagar
  • George Tzimas
  • Navika Maglani
  • Maria Alexandra (Ally) Theodorescu
  • Jainam Shah
  • Srikar Madarapu
  • Edward Xu
  • Anisha Patel
  • Arun Sivakumar
  • Gokul Sivakumar
  • Arun Gopal Govindaswamy
  • Tianyi (Jocelyn) Tan
  • Xinsong Li
  • Peter Szczepanski
  • Mingfei Shao
  • Matthew Yung
  • Caroline Cao
  • Sriram Yarlagadda
  • Sungmin Kim
  • Max Li
  • Carleton Smith
  • Charlie Rohlf
  • Thavaselvi Ramalingam
  • Marc Ardito
  • John Campion
  • Michael Doran
  • Charles Dowling
  • Xiaotao Fang
  • John Feigenbaum
  • Chandler Gegg
  • Michael Gredlics
  • Dony Kartawijaya
  • Lynette Lilly
  • Chanokporn Limpsangsri
  • Cynthia Michalowski
  • Vesna Mitrovic
  • Ronald Niehaus
  • Jon Nowick
  • Jennifer Piane
  • Ewa Piatkowska
  • Andrew Smith
  • Winnie Tsang
  • Shu Xie
  • Jose Zamacona
  • Dmitry Zinovev

Undergraduates

  • Maria Alexandra (Ally) Theodorescu
  • Valerie Simonis
  • Xufan Ma
  • Kyle Moy
  • Stelian Aioanei
  • Richard Brock
  • Jennifer Chow
  • Andrew Corboy
  • Eugene Ioffe
  • Mikhail Kalinin
  • Arati Kurani
  • Jong Lee
  • Pia Opulencia
  • Carl Philips
  • Greg Smith
  • Cecelia Story
  • Winnie Tsang
  • Joseph Wantroba
  • Dong-Hui Xu