Patricia Ordóñez
Tenure-Track
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department of Information Systems
College of Engineering and Information Technology
She/Her/Hers/Herself
About
I received a PhD from the department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I defended my dissertation on March 29, 2012 and my doctoral degree was conferred on May 18, 2012. I was a non-traditional student, meaning I took a huge leap of faith while experiencing a close to mid-life crisis. Ages ago as an undergraduate, I was scared off by electrical engineering (computer science was just starting then). After years of teaching high school math and Spanish and even more years of being a technical trainer, I decided to go back to school full-time to pursue a graduate degree and explore my mind's fullest potential. UMBC took a chance on me and admit me with full funding in Fall of 2005. Thank you, CSEE department at UMBC!Research interests
My research interests are in applying machine learning, data mining, and visualization to multivariate time series analysis, specifically to large repositories of clinical data (also known as Biomedical Data Science). There are so many techniques that have been applied to financial and marketing data that can make a significant impact to improve the way medicine is practiced today. Through collaboration among computational scientists, medical professionals, and others, tools can be developed to create clinical decision support systems so that medical providers make better diagnosis and treatment plans by learning from the experience of previous providers who have had similar patients. I founded the Symposium of Health Informatics for Latin America and the Caribbean as a major step in addressing that objective through international collaboration. I am passionate about making quality health and education accessible to all. I am also passionate about diversifying the field of computer science and thereby am active in mentoring and developing mentoring communities at the elementary, middle, and high school level, college and graduate school level, and in creating assistive technologies for programming and communication so that computer science is for all.Teaching interests
I enjoy teaching technical courses about programming, databases, data mining and more. I also enjoy interdisciplinary courses that include topics such as biomedical data science, computational science, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. I am passionate about democratizing computing and STEMM education and computational science research. As such, I incorporate equity-enabling pedagogies and am involved in and promote informal learning of computing and computational science in marginalized communities.Education
- Ph D, Computer Science — University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2012)
- MS, Computer Science — University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2010)
- BA, Hispanic and Italian Studies — Johns Hopkins University (1989)