David O. Nahmias, Ph.D.


dnahmias1@gmail.com

David Nahmias | Personal
 

I am currently a Lead Health Data & Bioinformatics Scientist at The MITRE Corporation. I have experience in medical devices, development and regulation, and electronic health records. My current interests are broadly at the insection of data science and health with the aim to gain insights to improve public health and policy. I also have extensive experience in advancing biomedical innovation with experience in medical device regulation, managing health data, and electronic medical records. My past projects have involved database testing of intelligent medical device alarm algorithms and big data analytics of neural activity.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland while conducting research in the Human-Device Interaction group at the FDA.

You can find my resume here;
or a more comprehensive CV here.

When I am not working, I am:

  • Playing volleyball.
  • DJ-ing.
  • Traveling.
  • Coding up fun projects.

Work.

MITRE

Lead Health Data & Bioinformatics Scientist

Experience:

  • Bioinformatics
  • Clinical qualtiy
  • Medical devices
  • Regulatory consulting
  • Public health and policy
https://www.mitre.org

Overview:

In the Clinical Quality and Informatics Group within the Health Innovation Center as part of the Health Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC).
Health data scientist active in projects developing and guiding methods to obtain data-driven insights to improve public health.

Year: March 2021 - Present
reNu

reNu Data, LLC - Founder & Principal Consultant

Experience:

  • Consulting
  • Data science
  • Product development
  • Data integration
renudata.com

Overview:

Data science, machine learning, statistical and information technology consulting firm focusing on local technology and education companies. Client domains have included: biotechnology, finance, and education.
Aid clients with large amounts of data, generally proprietary, to improved product performance, new product features, and direct future product development.

Year: January 2019 - Present
FDA

Research Electrical Engineer

Experience:

  • Medical Devices
  • Advanced alarm algorithms
  • Patient monitoring
  • Medical device review
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/cdrh-research-programs/advanced-patient-monitoring-and-control

Overview:

Staff researcher and medical device review consultant in the Advanced Patient Monitoring and Controls (AMPC) group in the Division of Biomedical Physics (DBP) under the Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL) within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
My research aims to advance regulatory science through better understanding and analysis of intelligent medical device alarm algorithms for patient monitoring applications through quantitative metrics and database testing.

Year: September 2019 - March 2021
ORISE

ORISE (Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education) Fellow

Experience:

  • Medical Devices
  • Neuroscience and Electrophysiology
  • Bio-Signal Processing and Recognition
www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ScienceandResearch/ ResearchPrograms/ucm477385.htm

Overview:

ORISE Fellow in the Human-Device Interaction (HDI) group in the Division of Biomedical Physics (DBP) under the Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL) within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
My research aims to advance regulatory science through better understanding and analysis of electrophysiology and other biomarkers as well as through the study of human interaction with existing and emerging medical device technologies.

Year: September 2016 - August 2019
UMD

Health I.T. Specialist

Experience:

  • Hardware specialist
  • Technology support specialist
  • System administrator
sph.umd.edu/content/sph-solutions-center-information-technology-facilities

Overview:

Manage and support the School of Public Health's technology infrastructure.
Support and troubleshoot computer hardware, software, servers, networking, virtualization, mobile/tablet computing, cloud resources, database, and enterprise systems.

Year: September 2015 - August 2016
Epic

Server Systems Engineer

Experience:

  • Caché System Manager Certified
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Trained
  • UNIX administrator
  • Server performance analysis
  • M (programming language)
  • C#/.NET
www.epic.com

Overview:

Manage Epic’s database system, via InterSystem’s Caché database, both through development and implementation of database server systems for new Epic customers and support of existing implementations of Epic software at various health organizations.
Unix database administrator and Caché system manager.

Year: August 2014 - August 2015
NIST SURF

SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow)

Experience:

  • Regulatory Research
  • SmartMotor programming
  • Engineering design and machining
  • Technical writing
www.nist.gov/surfgaitherburg

Overview:

Done in the Intelligent Systems Division of the Engineering Lab (E.L.) at NIST. Managed a full independent project on AGV (Autonomously Guided Vehicle) obstacle detection and avoidance.
Designed and constructed computer controlled mechanical system to move obstacles, such as test pieces or mannequins, with controllable displacement and velocity. Further developed AGV’s sensing ability and testing procedure for industry standards.
Details regarding the project cannot be posted outside of NIST as per their regulations.

Year: May 2013 - August 2013
Swarthmore ITS

SEED (Summer Educational E-project Developer)

Experience:

  • HTML/CSS, jQuery
  • JavaScript
  • Google Analytics
  • Python
  • WeBWorK via Perl
www.swarthmore.edu/information-technology-services

Overview:

Software engineering position that demanded learning new languages and software packages as each project was developed in a collaborative environment.
Developed websites for psychology experiments using JavaScript and libraries such as jQuery and Raphaël along with Google analytics for analysis. [See Website].
Explored and documented WeBWorK’s capabilities as an online tool for math courses. Created assignments and solutions that are now the sole WeBWorK assignments for introductory math courses at Swarthmore.

Year: May 2012 - August 2012
Swarthmore Engineering

T.A. (Teaching Assistant)

Courses:

  • E11: Electric Circuit Analysis (2 semesters)
  • E12: Linear Physical Systems Analysis
  • E14: Experimentation Design for Engineers (2 semesters)
  • E58: Control Theory and Design
www.swarthmore.edu/engineering

Overview:

Lead problem sessions for students to assist with weekly homeworks, tutored students one-on-one as needed, guide review sessions for exams and grade homework assignments.

Year: January 2012 - June 2014

Projects.

 
 
  • My Work 20
  • My Work 20

IEEE-EMBS BHI 2021 Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present simulation methods for evaluating clinical early warning algorithms. Published in Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI’21), July 2021.

Resources:

Year: 2021
 
  • My Work 19
  • My Work 19

Physiological Measurement Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present considerations for evaluating clinical prediction algorithms. Published in Journal of Physiological Measurement, June 2021.

Resources:

Year: 2021
 
  • My Work 18
  • My Work 18
  • My Work 18

Frontiers in Neuroscience Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present a framework and results of a scoring method for signal quality in EEG. Published in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, March 2021.

Resources:

Year: 2021
 
  • My Work 17
  • My Work 17

KDD 2020 Conference Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present a framework and results of a novel machine learning algorithm that identifies important learned features of EEG. Published in the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Conference as Oral Presentation, August 2020.

Resources:

Year: 2020
 
  • My Work 16
  • My Work 16

Nature Scientific Reports Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present results of machine learning research as the first results identifying medications soley based on EEG. Published in the Nature Scientific Reports, August 2020.

Resources:

Year: 2020
 
  • My Work 15
  • My Work 15

Doctoral Dissertation

Overview:

Dissertation for Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland (UMD), defended April 3, 2020. I Co-advised by Dr. Kimberly Kontson (FDA) and Prof. Jonathan Simon (UMD).

Resources:

Year: 2020
 
  • My Work 14
  • My Work 14

Journal of Neural Engineering Article

Overview:

The aim of this article is to present results of research done at the FDA in qEEG consistency. Published in the Journal of Engineering, November 2019.

Resources:

Year: 2019
 
  • My Work 13
  • My Work 13

NER 2019 Conference Paper

Overview:

The aim of this conference poster and paper is to present results of research done at the FDA in neural connectivity. Presentented at the 2019 9th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER).

Resources:

Year: 2019
 
  • My Work 12
  • My Work 12

WeRob 2017 Conference Paper

Overview:

The aim of this conference poster and extended abstract is to present preliminary results of research done at the FDA on qEEG. Presentented at the 2017 International Symposium on Wearable Robotics and Rehabilitation (WeRob). Extensions of this work appear in future journal publications.

Resources:

Year: 2017
 
  • My Work 11
  • My Work 11

Harmonic Analysis Paper

Overview:

This paper explores the spectral graph theory and Fourier Transforms on graphs along with their potential applications to electroencephalography.

Resources:

Year: 2017
 
  • My Work 10
  • My Work 10
  • My Work 10
  • My Work 10

Neural Modeling Project

Overview:

The aim of this paper is to construct a neural-network based video tracker that learns to associate the motion of tracked objects with a sequence of video frames.

Resources:

Year: 2017
 
  • My Work 9
  • My Work 9

Wavelets Paper

Overview:

This paper explores the Group Invariant Scattering Transform proposed by Stéphane Mallat in 2012.

Resources:

Year: 2016
 
  • My Work 8
  • My Work 8
  • My Work 8

Engineering Senior Thesis

Overview:

For my senior thesis in engineering I designed and constructed a system to acquire and analyze electromyography (EMG) data and then using artificial neural networks recognize various hand gestures to control a mouse and keyboard in real-time. The system had over 99% accuracy for four hand gestures. [Swarthmore Publication]
Presented at Swarthmore's Agora Talks May 2014 as one of seven senior projects across all disciplines.

Resources:

Year: 2014
 
  • My Work 7
  • My Work 7
  • My Work 7

Mathematics Senior Paper

Overview:

My mathematics paper for my senior conference delved into the derivation and applications of the Haar and Daubechies-4 wavelets specifically in signal processing.

Resources:

Year: 2014
 
  • My Work 6
  • My Work 6

Bilingualism Psychology Research

Overview:

This research, which spawned from an experiment I designed for a class, has shown that bilinguals represent syntactic structures over multiple languages in their mind as one intertwined syntactic structure rather than separate ones.

Resources:

Year: 2011-2014
 
  • My Work 5
  • My Work 5

Control Theory Final Project

Overview:

Using an infrared sensor the beam balances the ball at two different positions that alternate via a square wave input though a Proportional Derivative (PD) controller implemented on a Arduino board.

Resources:

Year: 2013
 
  • My Work 4
  • My Work 4
  • My Work 4

Computer Vision Final Project

Overview:

This project implemented a version of panorama image stitching where the program searches through a folder of images (for example, a folder of summer vacation photos), and determines if there are appropriate matches for some of the images. If there exist panoramas in the folder, the program outputs all possible panoramas that can be validly stitched together.

Resources:

  • Report
  • Source Code Coming Soon!
Year: 2013
 
  • My Work 3
  • My Work 3
  • My Work 3
  • My Work 3
  • My Work 3

Humanoid Robotics Projects

Overview:

Projects delved into path planning, kinematics, stability and implementation of various algorithms for humanoid robots. In particular the Darwin-OP and the HUBO were modeled and used. Projects built up from determinig simple statically stable poses to implementing Zero Moment Point (ZMP) walking while avoiding obsticle. These projects were documented via a blog, with videos, at DJrobotic [so named for the obvious pun and first two letters of the names of myself and Jackie Kay.]

Resources:

Year: 2013
 
  • My Work 2
  • My Work 2
  • My Work 2

Numerical Methods Final Project

Overview:

This project given a net-list uses a Modified Nodal Analysis (MNA) algorithm to find the solution to circuits that incorporate dependent and independent, both AC and DC, sources; resistors; inductors; capacitors; transformers; and idealized versions of the operational amplifier (op amp). Additionally, we implanted solution techniques for the simple circuits and single sinusoidal sources and find symbolic solutions for all other cases.

Resources:

  • Report
  • Source Code Coming Soon!
Year: 2012
 
  • My Work 1
  • My Work 1
  • My Work 1
  • My Work 1

Swarthmore Engineering April Fools 2014

Overview:

Continuing with tradition at Swarthmore Engineering, I led the prank to 'extend' the Crum Creak meander, a then new art piece on campus, through the dinning hall.

Resources:

Year: 2014
 
My Work 20 IEEE-EMBS BHI 2021
My Work 19 Journal of Physiological Measurements
My Work 18 Frontiers in Neuroscience
My Work 17 ACM KDD 2020
My Work 16 Nature Scientific Reports
My Work 15 Doctoral Dissertation
My Work 14 Journal of Neural Engineering
My Work 13 NER2019 Conference Paper
My Work 12 WeRob2017 Conference Paper
My Work 11 Harmonic Analysis Paper
My Work 10 Neural Modeling Project
My Work 9 Wavelets Final Paper
My Work 8 Engineering Senior Thesis
My Work 7 Mathematics Senior Paper
My Work 6 Bilingualism Psychology Research
My Work 5 Control Theory Final Project
My Work 4 Computer Vision Final Project
My Work 3 Humanoid Robotics Projects
My Work 2 Numerical Methods Final Project
My Work 1 Swarthmore Engineering April Fools 2014

Personal.

Research Interests:

Machine learning and statical signal processing with biomedical applications.

  • Machine learning for bio-signal and image processing for biomedical applications.
  • Non-parametric data driven statistical methods in population and clinical data.
  • Evaluating intelligent patient monitoring algorithms through quantitative metrics and database testing.
  • Neuroscience, electroencephalography, and electrophysiology.

Medical device landscape analysis to support biomedical innovation.

  • Findings improve device safety for patients and inform regulatory policies
  • Pre-market submission research to improve quality of approved devices.
  • Post-market signal monitoring to prevent adverse events.

I am also interested in applying these technical skills to other interesting domains with challenging problems.

Education:

University of Maryland-College Park

  • Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, May 2020
  • M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, December 2018

Dissertation: Advances in Quantitative Characterizations of Electrophysiological Neural Activity.

Recipient of an ORISE Fellowship for research at FDA fall 2016 - fall 2019.
Recipient of a Joshua Lippincott Fellowship in 2015.

Coursework: Statistical Pattern Recognition; Neural Modeling; Advanced Numerical Optimization; Image Understanding; Harmonic Analysis; Selected Topics in Analysis: Wavelets, Time-Frequency Analysis, and Frames; Advanced Digital Signal Processing; Random Processes in Communication and Control; Information Theory; Optimal Control; Embedded Systems; Intellectual Property Seminar; Microelectronics Seminar.
Audited: Neural Basis of Human Movement; Estimation and Detection Theory; Unsupervised Learning; Mathematical Methods in Machine Learning; Computational Linguistics I.

Years: September 2015-May 2020


Swarthmore College

  • B.S. Engineering (Concentrations in Electrical Engineering and Robotics)
  • B.A. Mathematics (Concentration in Statistics)

Engineering Design Thesis: Electromyography Analysis and Recognition for Human Device Interface.
Mathematics Thesis: Development and Applications of Wavelets in Signal Processing.

Recipient of The Albert Vollmecke Engineering Award for 2014.
Nominated and elected as an associate member of Sigma Xi, Scientific Research Honors Society.

Years: September 2010-June 2014


Watkins Mill High School

  • Maryland State High School Diploma
  • International Baccalaureate Diploma

Certificate of Merit from State of Maryland
College Board AP Scholar

Years: September 2008-June 2010

Contact and Social:

dnahmias1@gmail.com
0000-0001-6159-1172

Professional and academic references can be provided upon request.

© Copyright 2022 | Designed&Developed by David Nahmias