Meet MICHI Team
Our team is made up of multidisciplinary and inter-professional people working together to create innovative research in health intelligence and informatics. We believe in our vision and strive to achieve it through research, education and strategic partnership.
MICHI TEAM
Dr. Marion J. Ball
Executive Director
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Dr. Marion Ball is an international innovator, educator, author, and member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) with over forty-five years of experience in the healthcare IT community. Her research focuses are on health informatics, curriculum design, education, and research towards bringing enabling technology from theory into practice. Dr. Ball served and continues to serve on a variety of boards, i.e., the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), President of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), board member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Health on The Net (HON), College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME), American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), Co-Chaired the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). She is a founding member of the TIGER (Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform).
Dr. Ball received numerous awards for her contributions to the world and was named as one of the Most Influential Women in Health IT by HIMSS. She also was awarded the high honor given by the American Medial Informatics Association AMIA, the Morris Collen Award., as well as the Francois Gremy award, the highest honor given in Health Informatics, given by the International Medical Informatics Association( IMIA ). Dr. Ball has over 400 publications in textbooks, journal articles, and book chapters.
Dr. Gabriela Mustata Wilson
Co-Director
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Co-Director of the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics and Professor in the Department of Kinesiology.
Dr. Gabriela Wilson is an internationally recognized health informatics expert passionate about harnessing the power of research and translating it into community action. With extensive experience in both industry and academia, Dr. Wilson currently serves as a Professor and Founding Co-Director of the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics (MICHI) at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Director of MICHI’s Health and Public Health Informatics division. With a background in chemical engineering, pharmacoinformatics, health informatics, and public health informatics, Dr. Wilson has demonstrated her active support to the Health Informatics community by serving in numerous leadership positions within the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA®). She is currently the co-chair of the HIMSS Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) International Initiative and the chair-elect of the AMIA Parmacoinformatics Workgroup. Dr. Wilson is a Fellow member of HIMSS and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics and a Senior National Academy of Inventors member. Dr. Wilson’s most recent activities focus on workforce development in public health informatics, biomedical informatics, and biotechnology, as well as research and education to address racial injustice and health inequity. As a result of her leadership and collaborative efforts, the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) named The University of Texas at Arlington the Inaugural Racial Justice and Equity Program Award Winner in 2021. For her contributions to the Health Informatics field and ongoing commitment to driving transformational change and leading towards improved health outcomes through the advancement of the best use of information and technology, Dr. Gabriela Wilson received the prestigious 2023 HIMSS Changemaker in Health Most Influential Women in Health IT Award.
Dr. Jon Weidanz
Associate Vice President for Research
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Jon Weidanz, MPH, Ph.D. is the Associate Vice President for Research, Professor with tenure, College of Nursing and Health Innovation and College of Engineering, and a member of the Multi-Professional Center for Health Informatics at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He founded the North Texas Genome Center at UTA in 2018 and served as its director until 2022. Dr. Weidanz has broad experience and interest in biotechnology with particular knowledge and expertise in immunology and immunotherapy research and product development. He has more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and published conference proceedings and has been an invited speaker at more than 50 conferences, universities and companies. While at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, he was named as a Distinguished Professor and recognized for his teaching accomplishments, receiving the prestigious President’s Excellence in Teaching Award and the Chancellor’s Council Distinguished Teaching Award.
His research has been funded by various agencies including the NIH, over many years to identify tumor-specific peptides presented by the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system for use as potential targets for immunotherapy. As part of this focus, his laboratory developed methods to discover antibodies that recognize specific peptide/HLA complexes that his laboratory dubbed as T-cell receptor mimicking (TCRm) antibodies. TCRm molecules share the binding selectivity traits of T-cell receptors while retaining the positive attributes of antibodies. TCRms are highly valued as research tools and his group has used them extensively to study antigen presentation in tumor cells. Furthermore, his laboratory has been active in research and development of other immunotherapeutic agents including soluble T-cell receptors, and multifunctional/multispecific protein-based molecules. His earlier interests led to the laboratory’s most recent exciting project, the discovery of a TCRm, EXX-1, to Qa-1b/Qdm peptide complex, the ligand for NKG2A/CD94 inhibitory receptor. The NKG2A axis is a newly discovered immune checkpoint that suppresses the cytolytic function of Natural Killer cells and CD8+ T-cells in the tumor microenvironment. His laboratory has shown that EXX-1 TCRm can enhance anti-tumor immunity against tumors in mice. Translation of these recent findings to immunotherapies for human cancers is being pursued by his former company, Abexxa Biologics that was recently acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim (https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.us/press-release/boehringer-ingelheim-acquires-abexxa-biologics-further-expand-its-research-efforts).
Additionally, Dr. Weidanz is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 25 years of relevant corporate biotechnology accomplishments, experience in the transformation of early-stage university technology into companies, directly involved as a founder or co-founder in the formation of four biotech start-up companies with two exits to pharma companies. He holds more than 40 issued pending and provisional patents (US and international) with 6 patents having been out-licensed to 3rd parties for commercial development. Recently, he was elected to the National Academy of Inventors for his outstanding contributions as an innovator.
Dr. Jacob Luber
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
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Dr. Jacob Luber brings an extensive research program that builds computational tools and frameworks that, at a massive scale, allow for cancer imaging data to be 1) contextualized in the oncology clinic to improve patient outcomes and 2) leveraged at the bench to augment drug discovery efforts. There exist petabytes of openly available cancer imaging data, but at this scale, the search and utilization of this data are challenging. After his undergraduate degree in computer science at Trinity University, Dr. Luber earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow.
His dissertation initially focused on developing linear programming algorithms to make genome assembly algorithms more efficient and cost-effective. Dr. Luber conducted his post-doctoral research at the Cancer Data Science Laboratory at The National Cancer Institute of The National Institutes of Health in the area of cancer imaging using machine learning. His focus areas are building search engines for petabyte-scale cancer imaging, building deep learning tools that are relevant in the oncology clinic and for drug discovery efforts at the bench, and studying how the microbiome contributes to patient response to cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Luber’s research has appeared on NPR Science Friday and has been profiled in The New York Times, Scientific American, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, ArsTechnica, Forbes, Der Spiegel, PBS, and The Guardian.
Dr. Denise Hernandez
Assistant Professor, Department of Kinesiology
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Dr. Hernandez received her PhD from the College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs (CAPPA) in Public and Urban Administration at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). She earned her Master of Public Health from the Texas A&M School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Science in Allied Health from Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on professional and social support for Community Health Workers (CHWs), CHW organizational development, as well as collaborating with CHWS to facilitate access between the community and healthcare/social services. She has worked alongside CHWs for over 10 years and is a Texas state certified CHW instructor. Dr. Hernandez is the founder of the DFW Community Health Worker Association as well as a member of the founding Board of Directors for the Texas Association of CHWs/Promotores. Denise is a member of UTA’s inaugural research team awarded the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities Racial Justice, Equity Program Award. Dr. Hernandez currently teaches in the Public Health program at UTA and continues working to strengthen the support for the CHW workforce through research and policy at the local, state, and national level. In 2021, Dr. Hernandez received the 2021 Ford Mujeres Legendarias Award for her work and service to the Hispanic/Latinx community.
Dr. Ogan Gurel
BioHealth Innovation Specialist
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Dr. Ogan Gurel has had a wide-ranging career spanning clinical medicine, scientific research, industry and academia. He currently serves as a BioHealth Innovation Specialist at the University of Texas – Arlington and the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics (MICHI). Dr. Gurel has had an extensive career in healthcare innovation with familiar names such as IBM, Samsung, Booz Allen as well as dozens of startups worldwide. Bridging the worlds of industry and academia, he has also held previous academic appointments as a Visiting Professor at the Solbridge International School of Business, Vice-Chair & Distinguished Invited Professor in the Management of Innovation program at DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology) as well as Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois – Chicago and Roosevelt University. Dr. Gurel’s over 35 years of experience spans multiple sectors: biomedical science, clinical medicine, strategy consulting, marketing, business development, executive management, marketing, and R&D management, with domain expertise in medical devices, digital healthcare, healthcare IT, molecular biophysics, and medical imaging. Prior to surgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Gurel obtained an MD degree Alpha Omega Alpha from the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, also doing graduate work in structural biology (M.Phil degree) and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemical Sciences cum laude from Harvard College working with Prof. Martin Karplus (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013). Authoring 14 peer-reviewed scholarly papers (as well as a novel, Waves), presenting nearly 200 conference proceedings, and co-inventor on ten patent applications (four granted), Dr. Gurel has also given keynote addresses and other speeches at scientific and business conferences and seminars worldwide. He has taught the mini-MD, a comprehensive overview of medicine for healthcare professionals for the past decade in locations worldwide, including South Korea, the United States, Italy, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
Jitenga Knox
Administrative Services Officer II
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Jitenga Knox is the Administrative Services Officer II for the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics. Hailing from Illinois, she received her Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology with a concentration in Sports Management and a minor in Business Administration from Eastern Illinois University in 2013. Working for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2013-2018 instilled her with the skills needed for her transition to Texas’ administration. She was employed with UTA’s Department of Kinesiology from 2018-2020. Jitenga joined MICHI from its launch in March 2020 and has been able to combine her sports-minded, innovative, and forward-thinking mindset, as well as her professionalism and healthcare knowledge to advance the mission and vision of the Center and UTA.
Daegan Blood
Administrative Assistant I
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Daegan Blood is an Administrative Assistant for the Center and an Alumnus of UTA. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in History in 2021, he went on to work as a Support Specialist in the Information Systems and Operations Management Department at UTA. With a background in various administrative fields, including his work in operations for a non-profit organization and interpersonal skills from retail, he brings many unique and varied perspectives to his role. Daegan joined MICHI in July 2023 and uses his knowledge and expertise to continue and enhance the mission of the Center.
POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWS
Dr. Soroush Ghaffari, D.V.M, Ph.D
Post-doctoral Fellow
Advisor: Dr. Jon Weidanz
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Dr. Soroush Ghaffari is an experienced veterinarian (D.V.M) trained in laboratory animals, small animal medicine, diagnostic imaging, and surgery. For the past five years, he has been researching in the field of immune-oncology and obtained his Ph.D. in Dec 2021.
He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dr. Jon Weidanz’s lab, where he can continually explore a wide breadth of exciting topics while helping other team members achieve their scientific goals. Some of his projects include developing and characterizing immunotherapeutic agents, such as TCRm antibodies, soluble T-cell receptors, and multifunctional (multispecific) antibodies for targeting HLA loaded with cancer-specific peptides. His most recent accomplishment was the development of the llama antibody, which can be used to treat some of murine tumors such as colorectal and lymphoma. This antibody works as an immune checkpoint blockader for murine non-classical MHC-Ia (Qa-1b/Qdm), an ortholog of human HLAE. This breakthrough discovery led to a prestigious research award and sponsorship from Boehringer-Ingelheim, which will allow them to answer other questions in the field of immune-oncology.
Dr. Mohammad Nasr
Post-doctoral Fellow
Advisor: Dr. Jacob Luber
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Mohammad Nasr holds a MS and BS from Sharif University. He is co-mentored by Manfred Huber, Ph.D.
Preparing New Leaders
The Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics is proud to apply the talents of enterprising students at The University of Texas at Arlington. Working together, UTA and MICHI are paving the way for a new generation of leaders in health informatics.