Meharry SACS Welcomes New Faculty Members

Benu Bansal, Ph.D. joins as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science. She will teach bioinformatics, applied machine learning and AI in health data. Her research uses computational and experimental methods to investigate biological systems, with a focus on cancer and neurodegeneration.

Firdous Kausar, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity. Her research interests include federated learning, blockchain-based cybersecurity and explainable AI. She designs privacy-preserving machine learning frameworks to detect threats in power grids and industrial IoT settings.

Zakaria Kurdi, Ph.D. joins as an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Data Science Department. His research focuses on the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining, particularly in healthcare for the early detection of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. He is the author of a two-volume book on NLP.

Subash Neupane, Ph.D. has been appointed Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. His research interests are in generative AI, healthcare, and cybersecurity. He aims to develop trustworthy AI systems for high-stakes decision-making in medical diagnostics and cybersecurity.

Naw Safrin Sattar, Ph.D. joined the Computer Science and Data Science Department as an Assistant Professor of High-Performance Computing. Her research focuses on developing scalable parallel algorithms for computationally expensive problems. She has worked at four Department of Energy national labs and has more than 10 years of experience with HPC.

Somayeh Bakhtiari Ramezani, Ph.D. joins as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Applied Computational Sciences. She will teach applied data science, high-performance computing, and quantum computing. Her research develops scalable and explainable AI methods for healthcare, with a focus on temporal data analysis, medical sensor signal processing, and personalized AI for predictive and preventive health.