Nova Smedley graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in December of 2019 with a doctorate in medical and imaging informatics, an interdisciplinary track in the Departments of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics.

Nova grew up in the rainy Pacific Northwest but ventured to do her undergraduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and earned a B.S. degree in biomedical engineering with a concentration in biomaterials and cancer biology. Afterwards, she obtained a M.S. and a doctorate in informatics.

Nova's Ph.D. degree focused on the use of machine learning to improve healthcare and touched on topics related to medical imaging (e.g., MRI), gene expression profiling, and survival analysis of cancer patients. With the support of Drs. Will Hsu and Alex Bui, she wrote an F31, a predoctoral federal grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and was awarded two years funding for her research on the use of neural networks for radiogenomic mapping.

For more details about her experiences in academia and industry, see her CV and research at the top of the page; and her Github, LinkedIn, and etc. at the bottom. She was a member of Medical & Imaging Informatics (MII) group at UCLA. MII's research can be found here.

Nova enjoys learning new ideas and tools for the betterment of our daily lives, although she probably spends too much time beautifying her figures in R. She loves cooking, buying plants, grocery shopping, peeling garlic, and watching matinees. Foodwise, her go-tos are sushi, yakitori, hot pot, and KBBQ. Nova also prefers coffee over water and thinks Mnemosyne has the best notebooks.