PhD Spotlight: Ramin Mohammadi, PhD’20 – Industrial Engineering

Ramin Mohammadi

Advised by Sagar Kamarthi, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Advised by Professor Sagar Kamarthi, mechanical and industrial engineering, the dissertation of Ramin Mohammadi, PhD’20, industrial engineering, was in applied artificial intelligence techniques to healthcare problems to maximize patients’ quality of life, while minimizing the potential financial burden for healthcare organizations. He used natural language processing methods to understand clinical notes to predict complications for patients who had undergone surgery. He built predictive models and automated decision support tools to help healthcare providers identify at-risk patients. For example, he developed a neural network model that prescribes a weekly activity target for individuals using their Fitbit activity data. The model combined both physical activity and behavioral data to come up with personalized activity targets.

As part of the PhD program, Mohammadi worked as a data science intern at Partners Healthcare Connected for Health. He also developed a neural network model for combining data from multimodal sensors for machine learning at Philips Lighting (Signify). The company filed a patent for his work. Additionally, he worked as a deep learning engineer intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, where he developed a reinforcement learning model to improve the quality of HVAC systems.

Mohammadi presented his research at prestigious conferences and published seven journal papers. In addition, he actively contributed to several grant proposals. He received the 2020 Akira Yamamura Excellence in Research Award from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) at Northeastern. He was also a finalist in the Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge III for his research on breast cancer.

In addition to being an active researcher, Mohammadi mentored fellow graduate students in their research. He also taught machine learning related topics as part of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) workshop series and R programming as part of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) workshop series. Additionally, he built high-performance computing machines for Professor Sagar Karmarthi’s research lab.

After receiving his PhD, Mohammadi joined Tausight as a machine learning engineer, where he leads a technical team focusing on data confidentiality, integrity, and the security of patients’ protected health information. In addition, he is an MIE adjunct faculty member at Northeastern where he teaches graduate courses in machine learning and data visualization.

Related Faculty: Sagar Kamarthi

Related Departments:Mechanical & Industrial Engineering