On Friday, Jan. 22, from 3 to 5 p.m., the Whiting School of Engineering will hold a reception at the Johns Hopkins Club lounge to celebrate two important milestones:
- Naming Ilya Shpitser as a John C. Malone Assistant Professor
- Announcing the formation of the Whiting School of Engineering's Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare
Ilya Shpitser, in the Department of Computer Science, will hold a John C. Malone Assistant Professorship, one of a series of professorships provided by John Malone, MS '64, PhD '69, to help recruit and retain faculty with the goal of improving healthcare using a systems-based approach. A data/inference specialist who focuses on inferring cause-effect relationships, Shpitser will be a member of the new center. His research includes all areas of causal inference and missing data, particularly using graphical models. Recently, his work has helped distinguish between causation and association in observational medical data. Shpitser started at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor this summer, received his PhD under the supervision of Judea Pearl at UCLA, was a postdoctoral scholar in the program on causal inference at the School of Public Health at Harvard, and was a lecturer in statistics at the University of Southampton.
The Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, under the leadership of Gregory Hager, the Mandell Bellmore Professor in the Department of Computer Science, is a multidisciplinary research initiative that will foster partnerships among engineers, clinicians, and scientists across Johns Hopkins University to catalyze, develop, and deploy innovations aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare.
John Malone has been remarkably generous in his support of Johns Hopkins, including a gift for the construction and naming of Malone Hall. The building, which opened in 2014, is designed to advance cutting-edge collaborative and translational research and has set a new standard for academic research facilities at Johns Hopkins.
