HOBI Education Day 2026

March 25, 2026

Students participated in a full day of workshops, research presentations, and competitions.

Winners

These HOBI students shared their research in exceptional ways. The title of each research presentation is listed below the winner’s name.

Poster Awards: Biomedical Informatics

Distinguished Scholar

Philipp Haessner

Perceptions of an AI Chatbot Integrated into a Patient Portal

Emerging Scholar

Aseel Al-Omary

Analyzing Stoma Reversal Rates Specifically Due To Perianal Disease (PAD) In Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Patients Using OneFlorida Data

Poster Awards: Health Outcomes & Implementation Science

Distinguished Scholar

Di Sha

Differential Blood Pressure Control Across Hypertension Sub-phenotypes

Emerging Scholar

Kelsey Lunsford

Designing a Multi-level Intervention to Improve Cancer Clinical Trial Referrals

Shark Tank: Innovating Scholar

Innovating Scholar

Harold Bishop

Developing Student Driven Tobacco Control Systems

Itinerary

• 9:00 am-11:00 am – Student Workshop: Matt Mitterko
• 12:00 pm-1 pm – Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Waisome
• 1:15 pm-2:30 pm – Research Presentations (Post-docs or PhD Candidates only)
• 2:45 pm-3:45 pm – Shark Tank, with Post-docs or HOBI students
• 4:00 pm-5:00 pm – Poster Session, with Post-docs, HOBI students, students working with HOBI faculty, and interns
• 5:00 pm-5:30 pm – Reception & Awards

Workshop: Finding Your Place: Developing Your Identity While Training for the Future

Matt Mitterko is HOBI’s Assistant Director for Education and Training Programs. The workshop will focus on building concrete tools to navigate your careers during your time at HOBI, and after, aside from the traditional steps we have available through academic milestones or progress measures. This workshop will explore how to build a sustainable set of practices for your long-term professional development. As deliverables, you will have a chance to define and outline your circle of advisers or mentors and identify if there are any gaps, explore communication tools to manage your professional relationships within the circle, design your future path as it aligns with your values, and identify ways to expand your own communities with intention.

Keynote: Mentoring Across Difference

Dr. Jeremy Waisome is the Thomas O. Hunter Rising Star Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Florida. Dr. Waisome leads the PRISEM Lab where her research focuses on mentorship and self-efficacy in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computing (STEM+C). Her primary interest is understanding how mentorship impacts student trajectories and self-efficacy in STEM+C. Her work reaches across the academic landscape, engaging elementary school kids and teachers to working professionals. She is a former member of the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Mentoring, Well-being, and Professional Development, and an expert for Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech. Dr. Waisome is a proud triple Gator, with a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in civil engineering from UF and is a member of the UF Hall of Fame and a 2024 40 Gators Under 40 Awardee. She is a newly appointed member of the International Mentoring Association Advisory Board and serves on the Board of Teach Engineering, a nationally recognized, standards-aligned repository for engineering activities.

Research Presentations

• Miranda Reid: Feasibility of a Community Navigator Approach for Lung Cancer Screening
• Akshita Gupta: Evaluating Time-Zero Kidney Biopsy Chronic Features for Prediction of Short- and Long-term Graft Function After Deceased-donor Transplantation
• Deyi Li: DeepJ: Graph Convolutional Transformers with Differentiable Pooling for Patient Trajectory Modeling
• Liliana Bell:  From Idea to Impact at Scale: AI Implementation Across UF Health
• Hongyu Chen: Agentic Authoring of OMOP Concept Sets from Natural Language