Advancing Education, Training, and Care | Carolina Data Science Now

Please join us for three lightning talks by professors and researchers in UNC-Chapel Hill’s academic community, centered around how data science is used to improve the experiences of students, trainees, and patients.

Speakers:

Our speakers for this month are as follows:

• Matthew Bernacki

  Associate Professor and Donald & Justeen Tarbet Distinguished Scholar, UNC School of Education

  Matthew L. Bernacki is a Donald and Justeen Tarbet Distinguished Scholar and Associate Professor in the Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States of America. His scholarship on self-regulated learning includes specific lines of study on metacognitive and motivational processes as well as their involvement in complex and dynamic relationships that can be observed during learning. He designs digital interventions and personalized learning tools to build and leverage students’ motivations and learning skills to improve their self-regulated learning in complex hybrid and digital environments. He uses learning analytics to understand, identify, and respond to students learning and has published over 60 peer-reviewed and invited works on self-regulated learning, personalized learning, motivation, learning analytics, and other topics.

  Matt is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology and an Editorial Board member for Contemporary Educational Psychology. He has previously edited special issues of Contemporary Educational Psychology, Metacognition and Learning, and the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. He completed postdoctoral training at LearnLab, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center spanning the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, as well as a Master’s degree in Social Administration from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, as well as a Master’s degree in Experimental Psychology and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA.

• Saif Khairat

  Associate Professor and Beerstecher-Blackwell Distinguished Term Scholar, UNC School of Nursing

  Dr. Saif Khairat is the Beerstecher-Blackwell Distinguished Term Scholar and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Khairat holds joint appointments at the Carolina Health Informatics Program, Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and the School of Nursing. He is also the Director of the Carolina Applied Informatics Research (CAIR) group.

  As a health informatics expert, Dr. Khairat investigates the development, implementation, and evaluation of Health IT solutions to improve health equity and access, particularly, virtual care. He has authored over 80 influential scientific articles in more than 35 different peer-reviewed high impact journals and conferences, and has been an investigator for more than $7.5 million in research grants over the past five years. His work has been featured in major media outlets, including the Harvard Business Review (HBR), American Medical Association (AMA), and the AHRQ Patient Safety Net (PSNET). Dr. Khairat is globally recognized for his expertise in Health IT and particularly, his novel work in telehealth to bridge the digital divide. He provided expert opinion about Digital Health and Innovation to the World Health Organization (WHO) with special emphasis on the Eastern-Mediterranean Region.

  Dr. Khairat is a leader within the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He was inducted among the inaugural class of Fellows of AMIA in 2019. Dr. Khairat earned his PhD in Health Informatics and bachelor’s and master’s in Computer Science from the University of Missouri, and MPH in Health Policy and Management from the Gilling’s School of Global Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• Adam Kiefer

  Assistant Professor, Department of Exercise and Sport Science; Co-Director, STAR Heel Performance Laboratory

  Adam Kiefer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where co-directs the Simulation, Training, Analytics and Rehabilitation (STAR) Heel Performance Laboratory.

  Adam’s research takes a complex systems approach to both performance enhancement and injury prevention in sport. He integrates portable technologies with artificial intelligence (AI) to improve training and clinical outcomes. His expertise in behavioral dynamics and AI provides an innovative approach to measuring, modeling and analyzing the complexity of healthy and pathological human performance in a variety of contexts. His most recent work is focused on modeling athlete phenomics and phenotypic plasticity in the context of athlete health.

  Adam has published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals that have been cited nearly 600 times and secured over $6 million in funding to support his research. He has also presented as an invited speaker at national and international conferences, including meetings hosted by FC Barcelona, the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at IBM. Adam is a co-inventor on two sports technology patents and is the co-founder and CEO of Elipsys LLC, a sports technology company. In October of 2021, Adam was granted full membership into the Scientific Research Honor Society, Sigma Xi.

  Adam earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 2009, after which he trained as a post-doctoral research associate at Brown University until 2013. Prior to his Ph.D., Adam received a Master of Science in Movement Science from Barry University in 2005 and a Bachelor of Science in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse in 2003. Prior to his arrival at UNC in 2019, Adam served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and as the Director of Research Education in the Division of Sports Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

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