Welcome to the Luber Lab
Welcome to the Luber Research Group at the The University of Texas at Arlington. We build computational tools and frameworks that at massive scale allow for cancer imaging data to be:
- Contextualized in the oncology clinic to improve patient outcomes.
- Leveraged at the bench to augment drug discovery efforts.
The lab also focuses on developing computational and statistical methods for handling high throughput `omics data such as single cell transcriptomics/spatial transcriptomics (10X Visium & Chromium), spatial proteomics (CODEX), and calcium imaging. A one page summary of projects in the lab can be viewed here.
Specifically, focus areas are building search engines for petabyte scale cancer imaging, building interpretable deep bayesian model architectures that are relevant in the oncology clinic and make sense when used in the context of the differential diagnosis, and studying how the microbiome contributes to patient response to cancer immunotherapy.
The lab is currently supported by Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas grant RR220015 ($2,000,000; 2021-2026) and a University of Texas System Rising STARs early career faculty award ($250,000; 2021-2023).
News
March 23rd 2023Congrats to postdoctoral fellow Michael Robben, Ph.D., whose paper "Comparison of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Machine Learning Algorithms and Feature Selection on KEGG Database Microbial-Gene Pathway Annotation and its Effects on Reconstructed Network Topology" has been accepted at the Journal of Computational Biology. PhD candidate Mohammad Nasr and PhD student Avishek Das also made contributions to the paper.
March 6th 2023Congrats to masters student Aarushi Jain for securing internship offers at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory!
March 2nd 2023Congrats to PhD student Jillur Rahman Saurav for being selected for the highly competitive 2023 Google CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP)! CSRMP matches students from historically marginalized groups with peers and a Google mentor to support their pursuit of computing research pathways. Saurav was selected for this based on the strength of his preprint A SSIM Guided cGAN Architecture For Clinically Driven Generative Image Synthesis of Multiplexed Spatial Proteomics Channels.
February 15th 2023Congrats to undergraduate Paul Koomey on being accepted to the PhD program in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University! This is currently the number 1 ranked CS PhD program in the world.
January 19th 2023Congrats to PhD students Mohammad Nasr and Amir Hajighasemi for having their co-first author paper Clinically Relevant Latent Space Embedding of Cancer Histopathology Slides Through Variational Autoencoder Based Image Compression accepted at the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)! Visiting Assistant Professor Helen Shang, MD, MS did the clinical work for this paper and is extending it to retrospective concordance studies in the ER.
October 1st 2022Congrats to undergraduate Paul Koomey on receving a full time job offer at Goldman Sachs! The lab is recruiting stellar UTA CS undergraduates who want to become involved in research that will jumpstart careers.
October 1st 2022Congrats to undergraduate Paul Koomey on winning the UTA CSE undergraduate academic achievment award for having the top GPA out of 2,055 undergraduates in the department!
July 19th 2022Congrats to postdoc Michael Robben, Ph.D. for having his paper Selection of an Ideal Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Perturbation Effects on Network Topology of Bacterial KEGG Pathways accepted at the ACM BCB CNB-MAC workshop! We are using this algorithm to perform directed evolution experiments/crispri screens to design phage that "shape" the microbiome so that it ideally synergizes with checkpoint blockade inhibitors. Michael will give a talk on this at the ACM BCB conference in Chicago next month.
April 19th 2022Congrats to PhD Students Kelli & Anne for winning second place in the graduate research category at the annual UTA College of Engineering Innovation Day poster competition!