University Of Delaware: In Memoriam: Hagit Shatkay-Reshef

Wilmington DE

20 January, 2022

10:53 AM

Description

Press release from the University of Delaware: Article by Maddy Lauria January 20, 2022 Campus community remembers professor, bioinformatics expert Hagit Shatkay, a University of Delaware professor and bioinformatics expert, passed away on Jan. 2, 2022. Dr. Shatkay served as a professor at the College of Engineering's Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) and Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as at the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Data Science Institute. Her research interests focused on biomedical computing, computational biomedicine and computational methods in the sciences, including biology, medicine and physics. She was an expert in machine learning and data science methods as applied to scientific and biomedical data. "Hagit was one of the most principled people I have ever met, and one of the most caring for her students — and, by extension, her colleagues," said Kathleen McCoy, her colleague in CIS and the department's former chair. "She demanded much and had extremely high standards, but also provided so much mentorship. She gave very freely of her time, and she was always more than willing to help students and faculty succeed. She was quite a role model." She was such a role model for Pengyuan Li, who worked with Dr. Shatkay during his doctoral program from 2015 to 2021. Beyond guiding him through his academic work, she also shared life wisdom that helped shape him into the researcher and person he is today. Over the last five years, Dr. Shatkay worked closely with her CIS colleague, Cecilia Arighi, on a research project funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. Arighi, an associate professor, said she was amazed by Dr. Shatkay's passion as she described her work. Together, they and other researchers worked to incorporate image-based features into biomedical document classification, which would advance the technologies needed to more quickly and efficiently access a wide-range of biomedical information. "Hagit was very rigorous and had a strong work ethic, which I really admired," Arighi said. "We both lived minutes away in Rockville, Maryland, and I have many fond memories of our work meetings in random coffee shops. She will be deeply missed." In one of her latest research endeavors, funded by a $1 million National Science Foundation grant, Dr. Shatkay sought to develop computational methods that would accelerate data-intensive discovery in astroparticle physics, with a goal of better understanding dark matter. "Hagit has been an inspiration to us all, not just for her distinguished scholarship and amazing accomplishments as a professor and a mentor, but also for her integrity and passion," said Cathy Wu, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Wu, Dr. Shatkay's colleague in CIS, recruited Dr. Shatkay to UD in 2010.  "She remained a fighter in combating terminal illness. I am grateful to be able to pay tribute to Hagit through a collaboration with her last December in nominating her as Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) to recognize her outstanding contribution to the fields," Wu said.  The ISCB Fellow nomination described Dr. Shatkay as being "among the pioneers of biomedical text mining introducing text as another characteristic type of  biological/genomic/proteomic data, which helps shed light on other molecular data. She has also been a first to introduce the integration of images into text mining, and one of the first to introduce similarity queries over sequential/temporal clinical data." Dr. Shatkay received her bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and earned her doctoral degree in computer science from Brown University in 1999. She served as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information before spending two years as a private-sector informatics research scientist at Celera Genomics. She returned to academia as an assistant professor at Queen's University in 2004, where she worked until joining UD's Department of Computer and Information Sciences as an associate professor in fall 2010. She joined the Center for Biomedical Engineering Research that same year and was promoted to full professor in 2018. This press release was produced by the University of Delaware. The views expressed here are the author's own.