First grantees from Joint Research Project Program with College of Medicine named

Posted on February 13, 2026
person with wearable medical device
Jim Young

To advance economic and societal impact through collaborative research, UIC College of Engineering (COE) and College of Medicine (COM) launched a Joint Research Project Program last fall to foster collaboration among faculty between the two colleges.

The program’s goal is to foster collaborative research across both schools that harnesses AI and data for human well-being.

Seventeen projects were submitted for consideration, and six received funding. Projects range from predictive modeling for oral health to AI-powered drug discovery.

Awardees include:

  • COE’s Amit Ranjan Trivedi, an associate professor of ECE, and COM’s Mathew T. Mathew, an associate professor of biomedical sciences, for AI-Enhanced Electrochemical Microdevice for Oral Health: Smart Root Canal Disinfection and Predictive Modeling
  • COE’s Baoxin Li, department head and professor of CS, and COM’s Xincheng Yao, professor and Richard and Loan Hill Endowed Chair of biomedical engineering, for Artificial Intelligence Powered Multi-Spectral Fundus Photography for Accessible Management of Diabetic Patients
  • COE’s Sathya Ravi, an assistant professor of CS, and COM’s Hema Krishna, an assistant professor of clinical medicine, division of cardiology, for Smart Echo: Multimodal AI for Decisive Aortic Valve Assessment
  • COE’s Hao Chen, an assistant professor of CS, and COM’s Soroush Tahmasebi, an associate professor of pharmacology and regenerative medicine, for AI-Powered Drug Discovery Targeting ISR Pathway
  • COE’s Hamed Hatami-Marbini, an associate professor of MIE, and Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, a professor of MIE, with COM’s Ali Djalilian, the Searles -Schenk professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, for Physics-Informed ML Framework to Analyze Clinical Data for Keratoconus Disease Detection and Treatment Outcome
  • COE’s Elena Zheleva, associate professor of CS, and COM’s Alex Leow, a professor in the department of psychiatry and biomedical engineering, for Causal analysis of memory formation in the hippocampal dentate gyrus

Grantees received funding of up to $50,000, with the possibly of renewal for a second year.