The Informatics PhD Program celebrated a year of significant student achievement during the 2025–2026 academic year. Across all stages of doctoral study, students reached important milestones that advanced both their academic careers and the broader field of Informatics. During the year, nine students completed qualifying examinations, eleven students advanced to candidacy through preliminary examinations, and ten students successfully defended their dissertations.
The research represented in these milestones reflects the extraordinary breadth of Informatics as a field. Student work spanned all Informatics research areas, including Art & Cultural Informatics, Bioinformatics, Cognitive Science & Language Processing, Data Analytics & Information Visualization, Design, Technology & Society, Health & Medical Informatics, and Spatial Informatics.Their work addressed topics ranging from information retrieval to virtual reality, digital heritage, responsible artificial intelligence, and computational methods for scientific discovery.
Dissertation projects completed this year explored topics ranging from empathy-centered design in higher education and trust in online communities to language models, responsible information extraction, learning in virtual reality, AI-generated music, digital cultural heritage, exercise technologies, and computational approaches to biology. Collectively, these projects demonstrate the Informatics program's commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship that addresses complex technical, social, cultural, and scientific challenges.
The program congratulates the following students on successfully defending their dissertations during AY 2025–2026:
- Bushra Minhas – Bioinformatics (August 11, 2025)
Language-like Behavior in Protein Secondary Structure and Analysis of Mitochondrial Genomes and Transposable Elements in Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes
Chair: Julian Catchen
Committee: Alison Bell, Emily Beck, Alfred Roca - Eunmi Moon – Design, Technology & Society (October 7, 2025)
Designing for Empathy in Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study of Team-Based Learning with the Empathic User Experience Research Process (EUXRP)
Chair: Deanna McDonagh
Committee: Lisa Guntzviller, Juan Salamanca, Jung Mi Kim - Janina Sarol – Cognitive Science & Language Processing and Data Analytics, & Information Visualization (November 12, 2025)
Cross-Document Citation Content Analysis
Chair: Halil Kilicoglu
Committee: Catherine Blake, Jodi Schneider, Chengxiang Zhai - Zhenrui Yue – Cognitive Science & Language Processing (March 3, 2026)
Scaling Language Models for Knowledge- and Reasoning-Intensive Tasks: From Training to Inference
Chair: Dong Wang
Committee: Catherine Blake, Julian McAuley, Minjia Zhang - David Thomas – Health & Medical Informatics (March 26, 2026)
Automated Evaluation of Large Language Models Across Exercise Contexts
Chair: Sean Mullin
Committee: Shannon Mejia, Rachel Adler, Jason Fanning, Ian Brooks - Ke-Rou Wang – Design, Technology & Society (April 23, 2026)
Evaluating AI-Generative Music in Creativity: From Machine-Centric to Human-Centric
Chair: Sever Tipei
Committee: Ted Underwood, Jessie Chin, Stephen Downie - Colter Wehmeier – Art & Cultural Informatics (May 5, 2026)
Committed Artifacts, Situated Knowledges: Propositional Modeling as Design-Research Paradigm for Digital Cultural Heritage
Co-Chairs: Michael Tissenbaum, Georgios Artopoulos
Committee: Michael Twidale, Katerina Karahalios, Kathryn Holliday - Pingjing Yang – Design, Technology & Society (May 28, 2026)
Developing Responsible and Reliable Entity and Relation Extraction Methods: A Human-in-the-Loop Perspective
Chair: Jana Diesner
Committee: Jennifer Cromley, Unnati Narang, Halil Kilicoglu - Daniela Delgado Ramos – Design, Technology & Society (June 30, 2026)
Technological Mediation of Trust Through Constructive Design Research: A Community-Based Social Network Platform for Trust
Chair: Juan Salamanca
Committee: Peter Darch, Ben Grosser, Jana Diesner - Het Patel – Data Analytics & Information Visualization (July 2, 2026)
Decoding the Learning Traces: Using Behavioral Metrics to Understand Conceptual Growth in Virtual Reality
Chair: Matt Turk
Committee: Robb Lindgren, Michael Twidale, Yee Man Margaret Ng
In addition to these dissertation defenses, the Informatics PhD Program celebrates students who successfully completed qualifying and preliminary examinations during the academic year:
Qualifying Exams
- Jian Yang — Bioinformatics; Data Analytics & Information Visualization; Health & Medical Informatics (October 22, 2025)
- Lingtao Zeng — Data Analytics & Information Visualization; Health & Medical Informatics (October 30, 2025)
- Keith Jacobs — Health & Medical Informatics (October 31, 2025)
- Yiting Xia — Art & Cultural Informatics (November 10, 2025)
- Eman Abdelatif — Bioinformatics (December 2, 2025)
- Yiliu Tang—Data Analytics & Information Visualization (December 10, 2025)
- David Hopping—Design, Technology & Society (February 18, 2026)
- Joshua Muzei—Data Analytics & Information Visualization (February 24, 2026)
- Haoyang Liu—Cognitive Science & Language Processing (April 9, 2026)
Preliminary Exams
- Het Patel — Data Analytics & Information Visualization (July 7, 2025)
- Xinyao Qian — Data Analytics & Information Visualization (December 1, 2025)
- Brian Clark — Data Analytics & Information Visualization (December 10, 2025)
- Moazam Hakim — Data Analytics & Information Visualization; Design, Technology & Society; Spatial Informatics (December 11, 2025)
- Emmy Tither — Art & Cultural Informatics; Design, Technology & Society; Spatial Informatics (December 11, 2025)
- Dejan Trencevski — Design, Technology & Society (December 18, 2025)
- Alvarez Dixon—Design, Technology & Society (April 14, 2026)
- Keith Jacobs—Health & Medical Informatics (April 28, 2026)
- Mengke Wu—Design, Technology & Society (May 8, 2026)
- Bruno Nagel Tejada—Design, Technology & Society (May 11, 2026)
- Angela Fike—Data Analytics & Information Visualization (June 24, 2026)
These achievements represent years of dedication, curiosity, and scholarly growth. The Informatics community congratulates all students who reached major program milestones during the 2025–2026 academic year and thanks the faculty advisors, committee members, collaborators, and mentors who supported them throughout their doctoral journeys.