The University of Connecticut Board of Trustees recently approved the appointment of Associate Department Head Jinbo Bi, Ph.D. as the Frederick H. Leonhardt Computer Science Chair in the School of Engineering. In her ten years of service at UConn, Dr. Bi’s has established a research program in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence and their application to medical diagnosis and treatment that has gained national and international recognition.
Dr. Bi’s outstanding record of funding – awards totaling over $7 million in competitive federal funding as sole or co-PI – establishes her as a leading researcher in the CSE department and in her field. She is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2017, she was awarded the highly competitive MidCareer Independent Scientist Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Dr. Bi’s many professional leadership roles include serving as the General Chair of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, advisor for NIH’s Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Addiction (NIAAA) strategic planning for innovation in machine learning and big data analytics, and a highlighted speaker at the International Behavioral and Neural Genetics Society. She also received the 2019 Women Innovators and Leaders Award from the Connecticut Technology Council and the 2019 Distinguished Woman in STEM Award from Bay Path University.
The Frederick H. Leonhardt Computer Science Chair was established in November 1983 through a generous grant from the Fairfield County Community Foundation to endow a chair in Computer Science at UConn Stamford. Given the evolving needs of the University, the Chair was relocated in 2015 to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Storrs campus. Dr. Bi’s outstanding scholarship, leadership, and accomplishments make her an excellent choice for appointment to the Frederick H. Leonhardt Computer Science Chair.