Dr. Juan Cui is an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before joining UNL this August, she was a research scientist with the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia where she had her postdoctoral training. Her research interests include biomedical informatics and computational system biology, specifically focusing on cancer genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and utilizing computational prediction and modeling to address important questions related to cancer diagnosis and mechanism studies. She has published over 30 scientific articles and two book chapters in the field of bioinformatics, computational biology, and immunology and cancer research, plus two US patents in cancer diagnostic biomarkers discovery. As a computational biologist, she has been collaborating extensively with medical doctors and experimental researchers in both US and China during the past five years. She has also been actively involved in professional services including serving as members of editorial boards of bioinformatics journals and program committees of international bioinformatics conferences, and chairing cancer informatics workshops.
Juan Cui was born in the city of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province in China, where she finished her high school and colleague education. In 1998, She was enrolled in EE in the Northwestern Polytechnic University but two years later, she decide to change to a newly-formed major in the same school, information engineering, where she received her B.E. degree in 2002. After graduation, she went to National University of Singapore to continue her graduate study in computational science, where she was fascinated with the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. Four years later, she decided to join the computational system biology lab in the biochemistry and molecular biology department at UGA, where she has led a group in cancer bioinformatics and established her own research program.
“Being born from one of the oldest city in China (more than 3,100 years of history) and living for 4 years in Singapore, the most globalized country with such a mixture of different cultures and then coming to US for 6 years, I have gained so much amazing experience during this long journey in my life. I love travelling to different places in the world to get to know the local culture, religions, arts, languages, lifestyle and cuisine. To me, it is so exciting to explore unknown things, just as what they are. For my daily activities besides research, workout in the gym and walking my dog may be the most regular things I do in my spare time. “
Massimiliano Pierobon was born in Bollate (Milan), Italy. He received the Master of Science degree in telecommunication engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy in 2005. In 2006, Pierobon worked as a researcher in the R&D department of Siemens Carrier Networks, Milan, where he coauthored two filed patents on jitter buffer management. From January 2007 to July 2009 he was a graduate research assistant at the Politecnico di Milano in the fields of signal processing and pattern recognition. In November 2008 Pierobon joined the BWN lab, first as a visiting researcher and, from August 2009, as a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2013.
Pierobon received the BWN Lab Researcher of the Year Award at the Georgia Institute of Technology for his outstanding research achievements in 2011. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and ACS. His current research interests are in molecular communication theory for nanonetworks, communication engineering applied to intelligent drug delivery systems and biological circuit network engineering for microbial communication networks.
Pierobon is the grandson of Rita Pierobon, an Italian operatic soprano singer, and from his early life he received many stimuli towards music. When he was a teenager, he started playing the piano and studied classical music with a private instructor as a hobby. In his twenties he started composing his own pieces, some of which are today used as soundtracks in exhibitions around Italy. While a teenager, Pierobon was also a member of his high school theater company. Pierobon is a sailing enthusiast and in 2008 he received an international sailing license from the Italian Port Authority.
Ryan Patrick, a native of Ewing Township, New Jersey, comes to Nebraska from the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. He received a master's degree in computer science from Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio and his bachelor's degree in computer science from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), in Ewing. While at TCNJ, he was a mentor to Ewing High School's Team 2016 of the FIRST Robotics Competition. At UNL he hopes to work with local FIRST teams to involve an interdisciplinary group of students as mentors.
In his free time he looks forward to being involved with the University of Nebraska Cricket Club and the University of Nebraska Curling Guild.