Serghei Mangul was selected as a mentor for NIH AIM-AHEAD Fellowship
Serghei Mangul, assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, was selected as a Mentor for the Inaugural National Institutes of Health (NIH) cohort of the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Fellowship Program in Leadership.
According to the AIM-AHEAD Leadership Mentoring Program, “AI/ML lacks diverse researchers and underrepresented communities of practice. The acquisition of AI/ML skills by individuals from these diverse backgrounds, that go beyond academic settings and into the community, promises to improve the science and increase the availability of relevant data. Yet technical competence alone does not guarantee the continued expansion and adoption of AI/ML among the populations of interest. It requires talented people of color and disadvantage from diverse settings sufficiently conversant in AI/ML to translate its promise for advancing health equity and who, in turn, can attract others to join in this common agenda.”
The goal of AIM-AHEAD Fellowship Program in Leadership’s is to engage a diverse group of participants from under-represented populations to actively participate in mentoring activities to convey the leadership competencies necessary to promote and achieve its strategic goals. As part of this program Dr. Mangul will mentor Dr. Chitra Nayak who is an associate professor at Tuskegee University. The mentors of this program are recognized as champions in the area of AI/ML. Leadership Fellows will be matched with mentors based on AI/ML expertise, leadership experience, and sector. The Fellows will work with their mentors over a nine-month period to gain vital leadership skills in the application of AI/ML in diverse domains. Dr. Nayak’s research aim is to develop a machine learning algorithm to determine the role of ancestry-associated mutations in reprogramming the transcriptional profile that is linked to aggressive cancer and high mortality among African Americans. Dr. Mangul will be providing training to Dr. Nayak in the use of AI/ML methods to complete this interdisciplinary research in computational genomics. This will also result in future programs in AI/ML at Tuskegee University to empower students with cutting-edge methods for analyzing and interpreting large-scale next-generation sequencing datasets across diverse populations.