MURFREESBORO — The
director of MTSU’s Data Science Institute has been named WPC Healthcare’s first
visiting scholar.
Dr. Todd Gary’s appointment to the Visiting Scholars Program
was announced May 10. His time with the program, which began March 1, will take
place at the Brentwood, Tennessee, headquarters of WPC Healthcare, a provider
of professional services and predictive analytics solutions for health care.
The program hopes to better prepare interested students for
the data science workforce and help industry experts and academics share and
learn from each other’s research.
“MTSU is honored to have been selected as the first
university to participate in this program and we agree that Dr. Gary is an
excellent choice for the first scholar,” said Dr. Jackie Eller, interim vice
provost for research and dean of the College of Graduate Studies.
“MTSU is building a strong technical capacity in data
science and analytics that supports faculty research and graduate degree
programs in computational sciences, health care informatics, biostatistics,
quantitative psychology and computer information systems with a business
intelligence and analytics concentration,” Eller added. “We have great
confidence in the value and future success of this collaborative relationship.”
The Data Science Institute falls under the Office of Research
and College of Graduate Studies.
Gary is working with Damian Mingle, chief data scientist for
WPC Healthcare, and his team, providing research support on groundbreaking
projects that leverage data science to deliver practical solutions addressing
the major clinical, financial and operational concerns of health care organizations.
Gary said he’s honored to be a part of the Visiting Scholars
Program, in both “representing MTSU and to work with WPC Healthcare and Damian
Mingle.”
“I enjoy working on the kinds of complex problems they
strive to solve: saving lives and reducing healthcare costs,” Gary added. “I
hope to use this experience to help students become successful data scientists
and to demonstrate the mutual value of this unique university/industry data
science collaborative program.”
Gary holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Vanderbilt
University and has extensive expertise in data science and deep ties to the
data science community in the Middle Tennessee region. He completed a research
fellowship in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt and a NASA sabbatical in
astrobiology at UCLA, working with bioinformatics pioneer Jim Lake.
The program began out of interactions between the company
and Gary at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center in fall 2015 where Mingle
presented to faculty from MTSU, Tennessee State University and other local
universities interested in data science.
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