Bart Hammig, PhD
Dr. Bart Hammig is a Professor of Public Health and Undergraduate Coordinator of Public Health in the Department of Health, Human Performance, & Recreation at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Hammig’s main research focus is on intentional and unintentional injury, including the intersection of substance abuse and injury. Much of Dr. Hammig’s research utilizes big data and is grounded in epidemiology.
Jennifer Veilleux, PhD
Dr. Jennifer C. Veilleux is an Associate Professor of Psychological Science and a licensed clinical psychologist. She runs the TEMPT lab, which stands for Treating Emotion and Motivational Processes Transdiagnostically. Her research primarily focuses on understanding the motivational and emotional processes that underlie mental health struggles, with a focus on personality pathology and engagement in health risk behaviors (cigarette smoking, binge eating, alcohol use, non-suicidal self-injury). Her work has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Arkansas Biosciences Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. In addition to having expertise in psychometrics and measure development, Dr. Veilleux’s primary methodology is ecological momentary assessment (EMA). EMA involves obtaining real-time data from people on their mobile devices during daily life, where she focuses on looking at how motivational and emotional attributes vary over time and across situations. She has focused on attributes like distress intolerance, beliefs about emotion, willpower, and motivation to quit smoking, which are typically studied as stable traits rather than fluctuating dynamically over time. Her future plans involve the development of ecological momentary interventions, where treatment strategies can be delivered via mobile devices during moments of acute distress.
Song Yang, PhD
Song Yang is a Professor of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. His research areas are Social Network Analysis, work and organization studies, social stratifications, and social mobility. He published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and several books, including his recently edited volume “Social Network Analysis in Action: Basic Methods and Applications” by Springer in 2024.
Wen-Juo Lo, PhD
Wen-Juo Lo is an Associate Professor and Program co-coordinator in the Educational Statistics and Research Methodology (ESRM) program in the Department of Rehabilitation, Human Resources, and Communication Disorders at the University of Arkansas. Before coming to the U.S., he worked in a general hospital in Taiwan for 5 years and conducted inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy as well as psychological assessments. His research interests involve methodological issues related to latent factor modeling with a focus on psychometric methods in examining the validity and reliability of the psychological inventory. For grant-related works, Dr. Lo serves as a professional evaluator and co-PI on externally funded grants that sum over $20 million with various agencies. He serves as the quantitative methodologist at the center and provides statistical consulting as well as survey methodology advice on questionnaire design.
Khoa Luu, PhD
Dr. Khoa Luu is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU) Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is also serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Access Journal. He was the Research Project Director at Cylab Biometrics Center at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He led to develop successful AI solutions, including AI-based Smart Insect Monitoring System, Age-invariant Face Recognition, Mutli-camera Multi-Object Tracking, Long-range Biometrics and Soft Biometrics Systems, Perception and Prediction solutions for robots.
His research interests focus on various topics, including Autonomous Driving, Quantum Machine Learning, Smart Health, Precision Agriculture, Biometric Privacy Protection Biometrics. He has received six patents and two best paper awards and coauthored 140+ papers in conferences, technical reports, and journals.
He is an Area Chair in CVPR 2023 and a Co-organizer and a chair of the CVPR Annual Precognition Workshop from 2019 – 2023; MICCAI Workshop in 2019, 2020 and ICCV Workshop in 2021. He is a PC member of AAAI’20, AAAI’21, AAAI’22 ICPRAI’20, ICPRAI’22 and a technical member of IJCAI-ECAI’22, ICPR’22. He is also a reviewer for numerous top-tier AI conferences and journals, such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, FG, BTAS, IEEE-TPAMI, IEEE-TIP, Journal of Pattern Recognition, Journal of Image and Vision Computing, Journal of Signal Processing, Journal of Intelligence Review, IEEE Access Trans., etc. He was a vice-chair of the Montreal Chapter IEEE SMCS in Canada from September 2009 to March 2011.
Dr. Abigail Schmitt, PhD
Dr. Abigail Schmitt is an Assistant Professor of Exercise Science in the Department of Health, Human Performance, and Recreation. Dr. Schmitt is a biomechanist with a primary research focus of determining how gait is altered with injury or disease. Gait dysfunction is often multi-factorial and can arise from structural damage or functional deficits in the musculoskeletal system, the nervous system, or both. Her work has centered on better understanding the underlying mechanisms associated with gait dysfunction, which is important given the increasing incidence of disease and implications for medical and surgical interventions. Her research focuses on orthopedic injuries and diseases, particularly osteoarthritis or knee injuries, and neurological conditions, namely movement disorders. Her lab, the MOVE lab, also explores how emerging technologies and alternative assessment techniques can build better biomechanical assessments to improve gait performance.
Dr. Divya Bhagianadh, PhD
Dr. Divya Bhagianadh is an Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Department of Health, Human Performance, and Recreation at the University of Arkansas. She received her PhD in Health Services and Policy from the College of Public Health, University of Iowa. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University School of Social Work, focusing on Health Equity and Aging. Her research focuses on gerontology with an emphasis on healthy aging and end-of-life (EOL) supports and systems of care. She uses national surveys and, administrative datasets and quasi-experimental methods to explore the influence of federal and state policies on aging and EOL outcomes.
Jihong Zhang, PhD
Jihong Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Statistics and Research Methods (ESRM) program in the Department of Counseling, Leadership, and Research Methods (CLRM) at the University of Arkansas. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Department of Social Work. His academic journey in psychometrics began with doctoral training in the Educational Measurement and Statistics (EMS) program at the University of Iowa. His primary research focuses on AI in Educational data mining, psychological and psychometric networks, Bayesian latent variable modeling, Item Response Theory modeling, and other advanced psychometric techniques. His work is dedicated to advancing the understanding and application of statistical modeling in educational and psychological research.
Jihong Zhang has published extensively in leading journals, contributing to the field of psychometrics with works on Bayesian diagnostics, network analysis, and factor analysis. He is an active reviewer of multiple journals and conferences. His professional contributions include participation in funded research projects, such as the NSF CAREER grant and IES grants. His involvement in software development has led to the creation of interactive applications for psychometric network modeling and tools for visualizing and analyzing data using advanced statistical methods.
Dr. Anqi Deng, PhD
Dr. Anqi Deng is an Assistant Professor of Exercise Science in the Department of Health, Human Performance, and Recreation. Dr. Deng’s research integrates public health, behavioral science, and technology to develop innovative and holistic physical activity interventions for K-12 youth and their key social influencers, including teachers, afterschool program staff, and parents. Her work applies ecological and psychosocial frameworks to optimize school and community environments, fostering supportive social-motivational climates and physical activity-related knowledge learning that encourage physical activity participation. With a focus on technology-driven health promotion, Dr. Deng is leveraging Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI) to empower school teachers and afterschool program staff in promoting physical activity. By utilizing real-time data collection and personalized interventions, her research aims to enhance engagement, improve implementation strategies, and create lasting impacts on physical and mental well-being within school and community settings.
Shengfan Zhang, PhD
Shengfan Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at University of Arkansas, and Director for the Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution (CELDi). Zhang’s current research focuses on developing methodologies and solution approaches in medical decision making and health informatics, especially advancing predictive and prescriptive analytics for disease prevention, treatment, and monitoring. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation, Arkansas Biosciences Institute, Arkansas Breast Cancer Research Program, etc. She and her student co-authors have won several awards and recognitions, including the IISE Best Paper Award in Track, INFORMS Interactive Sessions Competition, INFORMS Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Best Student Poster, and IISE Data Analytics and Information Systems Data Challenge Competition. Zhang is currently an Area Editor for the journal Health Systems and Associate Editor for IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering.
Scot Burton, PhD
Scot Burton is Distinguished Professor and Tyson Chair in Food and Consumer Products Retailing, Sam M. Walton College of Business. His research interests include consumer health and well-being issues, consumer response to advertising and sales promotion, and measurement issues associated with survey research. He has received the American Marketing Association Lifetime Achievement Award in Marketing & Society, an award given to individuals who exemplify outstanding scholarship in the fields of Marketing and Society, Public Policy, and/or Marketing Ethics for contributions over their career. In 2021 he received the University of Arkansas SEC Faculty Achievement Award. He served as a Coeditor-in-Chief of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing from 2017-2020 and as a Special External Consultant to the FDA Risk Communication Advisory Committee from 2013-2020. He has published more than 130 refereed journal articles appearing in publications such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and many more. According to the 2024 Edition of Research.com Ranking of Top 1000 Scientists in Business and Management, among all active Marketing faculty (i.e., non-emeritus) in the United States, he was ranked as #18. He received the 2001 Arkansas Alumni Association Award for Research (a university award for which one faculty member is selected campus-wide for their overall contributions in research). Findings from his research have received substantial interest from the media and have been discussed in diverse business outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, (Bloomberg) Business Week, US News & World Report, NPR, MSN, Yahoo, and scores of other health and business journals around the world.