Feature — Focus on Faculty
Juan Shan, PhD Assistant Professor of Computer Science Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems
“What has impressed me most is that the entire University is at a rising period. . . the Pace Community puts the students and faculty first.”
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J
an Shan joined the faculty of the Seidenberg School u of Computer Science and Information Systems in September 2013 after teaching at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. At Pace, Shan teaches Introduction to Computing, Mathematics Structures, Computer Programming, and Fundamental Computer Science. “I have found the Pace Community to be very openminded and friendly,” she says. “What has impressed me most is that the entire University is at a rising period. From the president and provost, to the dean and department chair, the Pace Community puts the students and faculty first and makes every effort to create the best environment in which to study and conduct research.” Shan’s major research interests are in the areas of automatic diagnosis for breast cancer, medical image processing, and machine learning. At Pace, she developed an evaluation scheme to measure the accuracy of “knowledge representation” for automatic breast cancer diagnosis. “Precise knowledge representation is the foundation for any successful artificial intelligence system, including automatic breast cancer diagnosis,” she explains. “It is crucial to be able to evaluate how well the digital features are actually representing experts’ knowledge.” She is now collaborating with New York Medical College on a medical image processing project and working on proposals for interdisciplinary research that would involve radiologists and medical students. Shan received her PhD in Computer Science from Utah State University in 2011 and a BS in Computer Science in 2004 from Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China.