Shahin Boluki, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was named one of the three winners of the Young Scientist Excellence Award at the 14th Annual MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Boluki was recognized for exhibiting scientific excellence as a graduate student and presenting the paper, “Constructing Priors for Optimal Bayesian Classification and Regression using Unlabeled Data,” at the conference. The paper was co-authored by his research advisors in the department, Dr. Edward R. Dougherty, the Robert M. Kennedy ’26 Chair Professor and Distinguished Professor, and Dr. Xiaoning Qian, assistant professor, along with Dr. Mohammad Shahrokh Esfahani, postdoctoral research associate.
Boluki presented how his proposed method extended the application of optimal Bayesian classification/regression in biomedical problems such as phenotypic prediction, biomarker estimation and missing data imputation.
Boluki’s research interests include genomic signal processing, statistical learning and optimal experiment design. He received his bachelor’s degree with honors in electrical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran in 2014. He is currently working toward his doctoral degree in the Genomic Signal Processing Laboratory in the electrical and computer engineering department.