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Lab Members

Joanna Liang, BA
Research Operations Associate

Joanna Liang earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and a minor in natural sciences from the University of Southern California. She facilitates and implements the financial, grant management, operational and human resource activities for our team of engineers, scientists, research and administrative staff. She also acts as research coordinator for the cardiac imaging registry developed under Dr. Slomka’s NIH grant.

Bryan Bednarski, MS
Programmer/Analyst

Bryan Bednarski, MS, earned his master’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include generalizable AI for mixed-input, temporal applications. During his master’s program, he published algorithms to predict regional COVID-19 surges and optimally distribute medical supplies. Prior, he worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Systems Engineer on the Perseverance Rover motor controllers which successfully landed the spacecraft in February 2021 and are operational on Mars today.

Cathleen Huang, BA
Clinical Research Associate

Cathleen Huang earned her bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College, with a double major in molecular biology & biochemistry and political science. Prior to joining the Slomka Laboratory, she worked on a wide range of projects, such as analyzing generational differences in Asian American political participation and assisting with Addison County’s Community Health Needs Assessment. She is currently working on integrating newer data with the current cardiac imaging database and organizing clinical data.

Aditya Killekar, MS
Programmer/Analyst

Aditya Killekar, MS, earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. He specializes in computer vision and machine learning. Before joining the Slomka Laboratory, Killekar worked as a research programmer at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC. He implemented deep learning-based methods for detecting deepfake face manipulations for DARPA’s media forensics project at ISI’s Center for Vision, Image, Speech and Text Analytics. Currently, he is working on developing a deep learning-based, real-time detection and segmentation of COVID-19 lesions on noncontrast chest CT, providing an early alert of COVID-19 to the physician and technologist performing the scan.

Jacek Kwiecinski, MD, PhD
Consulting Researcher

Jacek Kwiecinski, MD, PhD, earned his medical degree (Hons) from the Poznan University of Medical Sciences, Poland. He joined the Centre for Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Edinburgh, U.K., to work on noninvasive biomarkers of left ventricular decompensation in aortic stenosis. Recently, he explored the potential of coronary 18F-NaF PET imaging in vulnerable plaque patients.

Richard Rios Patino, PhD
Postdoctoral Scientist

Richard Rios Patino, PhD, earned his doctorate in engineering energy systems from the National University of Colombia, Medellin, and in signal processing and telecommunications from the University of Rennes I in France. His doctorate studies focused on statistical modeling of geometric variations of the bladder in prostate cancer radiotherapy using dimensionality reduction and statistical learning techniques. His research aim is to develop learning-based methods that support decision-making of clinicians in the diagnosis and prognosis for cardiac diseases.

Konrad Pieszko, MD, PhD
Visiting Postdoctoral Scientist

Konrad Pieszko earned his medical degree from Wroclaw Medical University. He is a cardiology resident at the Nowa Sol Multidisciplinary Hospital in Poland and received a scholarship from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange for a scientific visit at Cedars-Sinai. In the Slomka Laboratory, he is working on applying machine-learning methods to cardiac imaging data in order to automate the analysis and improve the prediction of outcomes of cardiovascular diseases.

Aakash Shanbhag, MS
Programmer/Analyst

Aakash Shanbhag, MS, earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. He specializes in computer vision and deep learning. Before joining the Slomka Lab, he worked as a computer vision engineer at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) under Hao Li, MD. He implemented state- of-the-art generative adversarial networks, image synthesis methods for photo-realistic digital avatar generation, neural rendering for army research, segmentation and real-time dynamic occlusion handling collaborating with Snap Inc. Currently, he is working on developing a deep learning-based, real-time detection and automatic segmentation of coronary calcium from noncontrast CT.

Ananya Singh, MS
Programmer/Analyst

Ananya Singh earned her master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. She specializes in image processing and deep learning in medical imaging. She is currently working on integrating deep convolutional neural networks to further automate cardiovascular imaging.

Contact the Slomka Lab

8700 Beverly Blvd.
Suite Metro 203
Los Angeles, CA 90048