Professor Keshab Parhi elected AIMBE Fellow

Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Edgar F. Johnson Professor Keshab Parhi has been elected by the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) to its 2022 class of fellows. He is being honored for his “outstanding contributions to machine learning approaches for neuropsychiatric and ophthalmic disorders, and to synthesis of molecular computing systems.” Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer.

The AIMBE’s College of Fellows have revolutionized medicine and its related fields in ways that have positively impacted the lives of people worldwide. Fellows of the organization play a critical role in its mission of advocating for the advancement of excellence in medicine and science. Election as Fellow entails that they give back by actively engaging in advocacy efforts and public policy initiatives that impact the scientific, as well as the broader community.

Scientific contributions

Parhi developed the first rigorous machine learning approach to predict epilepsy from scalp and intracranial electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. In collaboration with other researchers, he has designed classifiers for psychiatric disorders such as borderline personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder from resting-state functional MRI. Under his leadership, his research team has developed new biomarkers for static network analysis and dynamic brain network analysis. They have also developed classifiers for schizophrenia from magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected during language tasks. This research will pave the way for therapeutic applications of closed-loop neuromodulation for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. 

Parhi’s team has also developed classifiers for ophthalmic disorders such as diabetic retinopathy from fundus or retinal camera images, and age related macular edema and diabetic macular edema from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. 

His team were the first to synthesize molecular and DNA computing systems for finite impulse response and infinite impulse response digital filters, and DNA machine learning systems for artificial neural networks for all types of activation functions. They also developed DNA support vector machines that could, in the future, be the foundation of in-vivo protein monitoring, and molecular drug-delivery systems.

Academic and service contributions

Parhi has been a committed and enthusiastic contributor to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University, and IEEE. He served on the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s Board of Governors, and as a member of the IEEE Fellow Selection Committee in 1998 and 1999. He was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part-I in 2004 and 2005, and has served as associate editor of the organization’s journals and transactions 14 times. He has served as an associate editor, reviewer, and session chair for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference organized by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. He has presented numerous tutorials on biomedical and health data analytics at conferences and to companies in the field. A distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, Parhi has presented numerous talks on low-energy machine learning, hardware security, and artificial intelligence for health applications. He has actively mentored hundreds of young colleagues at IEEE conferences, and is also a frequent reviewer of papers for biomedical journals published by Nature, IEEE, Springer, and Elsevier. Parhi holds 32 patents, has authored a major textbook, and has published 230 journal papers and 430 conference papers. His research publications have an h index of 81. He has graduated 48 Ph.D. (eight of them were women) and 65 MSECE students. Several of them are in prominent positions in industry and academia. 

Parhi’s contributions have been recognized widely: he is a Fellow of IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). These honors are a testament to his commitment to innovation, education, and the advancement of science for the benefit of society. 

The fellows induction ceremony will be held on March 25 during AIMBE’s 2022 Annual Event. Professor Parhi will be inducted along with 152 new members who make up the AIMBE Fellow Class of 2022.

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