Huang Receives ORAU Research Award

Promoting health equity in measuring pediatric cancer survivor outcomes

Dr. Xiaolei Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award for his research entitled “Causal Modeling of Confounding Bias in Pediatric Cancer Outcome Assessment,” from Oak Ridge Associated Universities. His selection is especially significant because there were 155 applications from 87 member institutions and he represents one of five awardees in the Health Disparities/Equity discipline area, which was sponsored by The MITRE Corporation, an ORAU strategic private industry partner.

Health equity is a leading challenge in evaluating cancer treatment outcomes of pediatric patients. The award will examine theories and practices of patient-reported outcome measures to develop human-factor-adapted strategies for promoting health equity so that medical benefits are not limited to selected demographic groups. The project proposes to build a knowledge database of the causal patterns to provide guidelines for healthcare providers and reduce communication barriers for pediatric patients and their parents from different demographic groups; and to develop new machine learning models for addressing the confounding bias to advance health equity of cancer-outcome-assessment technology and present actionable recommendations for clinical practice. The project will enhance research collaborations between the University of Memphis and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For more information on this award or the research, contact Huang at xhuang7@memphis.edu.