About

Hello! My name is Ali Turfah, I am a PhD student in the Biostatistics Department at the University of Michigan. I am interested in the statistical and computational problems that arise in biological and healthcare data, especially genomics. Right now I'm working with Dr. William Wen on problems related to model-based clustering.

I did my undergraduate studies in Data Science through the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, after which I worked for a year as a Data Scientist at Algo, a start-up in Troy, MI. I completed an M.A. in Statistics at Columbia University in December 2021, after which I worked in Dr. Chunhua Weng's research group on problems related to medical literature mining and evidence extraction. During the first year of my PhD I worked with Dr. Lili Zhao on a project related to methodology development for vaccine safety studies with a focus on the COVID-19 vaccines.

Overview

Please check out the Research page for a more complete list of research I've been involved with. Additionally, side-projects I've been involved in can be found on the Projects page. Below is some of the work that I am especially proud of.

• Vaccine Safety analysis with DPM Prior: Improve detection of rare adverse events via Dirichlet process mixture priors. (Under review)
• Observation Normalization for Evidence Computing: Standard representation of medical findings for evidence computing tasks. (Accepted to MedInfo 2021)
• Medical Evidence Dependency-informed Attention: Neuro-symbolic variant of Multi-head self-attention. (Published in JAMIA)
• EO2U Grimoire Editor: Desktop application to edit grimoire stones in Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold save files. Built in Python with Flask and Eel.
• Quarantine Pokemon League: Website for Pokémon draft league with built-in administrative features and analyses.

Getting in Touch

If you would like to get in touch, I can be reached at <aturfah at umich dot edu>. Additionally, please find my CV below, as well as links to my Github and Linkedin.