Constantin Aliferis, M.D., Ph.D., joined the faculty in July of 2000 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and a member of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. He served as architect and Founding Director of the MS/PhD Program in Biomedical Informatics. He was also the founding Director of the Discovery Systems Laboratory. Dr. Aliferis is now the director of the Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics at New York University.

Background: Dr. Aliferis earned an M.D. from the University of Athens in Athens, Greece. He completed a Fellowship in Medical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh (Dept of Internal Medicine), and earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the same university in Intelligent Systems (Medical Informatics track).

Prior Work: Before joining Vanderbilt Dr. Aliferis has published research in Epidemiology, Intelligent Interfaces for data analysis, Bayesian Belief Networks, Temporal Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning. In his doctoral dissertation, he pioneered extensions of Bayesian Networks to include explicit and hybrid-granularity temporal and causal modeling and dynamic abstraction.

Interests & Current Work:

1. Development and evaluation of machine learning algorithms for:
   • large-scale computational causal discovery
   • feature selection for classification
   • text categorization & information retrieval
2. Development and evaluation of methods for:
   • Discovery of molecular signatures and molecular biomarkers using gene expression, SNP, mass-spectrometry, and other "omics"-based data.
   • Evidence-based medicine
3. Temporal Representation and Reasoning in biomedicine
4. Bayesian Networks / Causal Probabilistic Networks
5. Graduate Education