CPERL-NLP unite to disseminate our science and graduate two rising women in science

We are excited to announce that we have another doctoral degree graduate among us this Fall! Dr. Mina Valizadeh is part of the Natural Language Processing Lab at UIC and has been mentored by Dr. Natalie Parde (dissertation chair) and with consult from Dr. Mary Khetani (committee member) towards her successful dissertation defense.

Mina has been actively involved in our joint projects, leading up to and including the NSF-funded project entitled Smart and Connected Family Engagement for Equitable Early Intervention Service Design. Just a few weeks shy of her dissertation defense, the CPERL and the NLP labs teamed up to attend and present at the NSF annual principal investigator (PI) meeting in Washington D.C., where Mina presented a poster in automated classification of caregiver strategies that she co-led with Vera, and Natalie and Mary partnered to create a recorded lightning talk about our project scope and progress to date. We also were introduced to a virtual community connecting PIs and collaborators across NSF-funded projects and look forward to using it to build new connections.

Taken together, this Fall has been productive and rewarding for our team. Natalie and Mary both graduate their first PhD students, Vera and Mina take their next steps as PhD trained team scientists pursuing exciting next steps in their respective career trajectories, and Vivian is gearing up to represent our team next Fall as she leads an exciting first aim of our project that is yielding clinically meaningful upgrades to our PEM product.