Misha Pavel, Ph.D.

Program Director, National Science Foundation

Title of Keynote Lecture: Transforming Health Care with Biomedical Engineering: Model-Based Approaches

As healthcare is rapidly becoming one of the far-reaching national and global challenges, technology-based solutions are increasingly viewed as a key component of a potential remedy addressing these demands. However, transforming healthcare to be evidence-based, patient-centered and proactive will require significant fundamental and technical advances. Recognizing these challenges, NSF has developed a program in Smart Health and Wellbeing that is focused on stimulating relevant research in key areas including computer science, engineering, and behavioral and social sciences, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of problems. In this respect, I will suggest a possible major role of biomedical engineering in addressing many of the key technical barriers to advancing health care quality while lowering costs. Biomedical engineering is a discipline that comprises a broad range of technical approaches. However, in order to play a key role in the transformation of healthcare, biomedical engineering will need to further broaden its focus to incorporate transdisciplinary approaches including ranging from computer science, cognitive science and social-behavioral sciences. Transforming healthcare will require application of computational predictive modeling at multiple scales to mobile health, behavioral (big) data, social networks, etc. Moreover, one of the key issues requiring new research efforts is the development of patient-specific computational, multi-scale models that will enable the utilization of heterogeneous, big data in conjunction with individual-specific observations and measurements. I will illustrate the model-based approaches on a small sample of specific problems.

Biography:

Misha Pavel is currently a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in charge of a program called Smart Health and Wellbeing. Concurrently, he has an appointment as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, at Oregon Health and Science University. Previously, he was a chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Point of Care Laboratory, which focuses on unobtrusive monitoring, neurobehavioral assessment and computational modeling. His current research is focused on technology that would enable transformation of healthcare to be proactive, evidence-based, distributed and patient-centered. Prior to his academic career, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research included network analysis and modeling. His current research is at the intersection of computational modeling of complex behaviors of biological systems, engineering, and cognitive science with a focus on information fusion, pattern recognition, augmented cognition, and the development of multimodal and perceptual human-computer interfaces. He developed a number of quantitative and computational models of perceptual and cognitive processes, eye movement control, and a theoretical framework for knowledge representation; the resulting models have been applied in a variety of areas, ranging from computer-assisted instruction systems, to enhanced vision systems for aviation, to augmented cognition systems. He has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from New York University, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Misha Pavel is a Senior Member of IEEE.