Leming Zhou, PhD, DSc

Dr. Leming Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Information Management of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and in the Department of Bioengineering of the School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Zhou earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from Nankai University in Tianjin, China. He earned his Master’s in Computer Science, his PhD in Physics, and his Doctorate in Computer Science, all from the George Washington University.  Dr. Zhou’s research interests include dynamic systems modeling, large scale data analysis, algorithms and software development, data mining, comparative genomics, and high performance computing. Dr. Zhou is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (since 2009) and the American Health Information Management Association (since 2009).  Dr. Zhou serves as a proposal reviewer for the National Science Foundation, a book reviewer for Wiley and Prentice Hall, and a paper reviewer for numerous journals including Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, PLoS ONE, Gene, Computational Biology and Chemistry, Chinese Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in BioMedicine, Journal of Supercomputing, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, and many others. Dr. Zhou is a co-investigator in a Veterans Health Administration supported research project. The major goal of this project is to understand the role of conflict resolution and short-term memory in aphasic comprehension. Dr. Zhou is responsible for data management and statistical model development for data analysis purposes in the project. Dr. Zhou is a task leader in the current Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) project on Information and Communication Technology Access at Pitt. The major goal of this task is to develop highly secure, accessible, and cross-platform mobile apps for people with various types of disabilities. Dr. Zhou is also a co-investigator in a different task of the same RERC project supported by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR). The major task of this task is to investigate security and privacy issues in health IT systems. Dr. Zhou recently finished one cost analysis research project on Acute Kidney Injury with the support from Astute Medical Incorporation. In that project, he was a co-investigator. Dr. Zhou is also conducting a computational modeling project on Osteoporosis, a personal genomic information analysis and management project, and a mobile app development project for people with communication disability. Dr. Zhou has been involved in several teaching innovations.  With grant funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he led the development of a new undergraduate health science education program, including six new courses and new teaching strategies. More than 10 faculty members from the University of Pittsburgh and other universities are involved in this program. He is currently a Co-PI in a NSF grant for creating integrated curriculum on Security Assured Health Informatics. Dr. Zhou is also a member of the Genomics Education Partnership.  This partnership encourages faculty members to integrate genomics research into undergraduate courses so that undergraduate students have the opportunities of conducting novel scientific research. This program is sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis, the NSF, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. View a list of Dr. Zhou’s publications here.