This page highlights recent lab activities, student achievements, collaborations, and selected historical milestones. We update it regularly as new projects, publications, and events occur.
2026
- Research Leave and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
In Spring 2026, Dr. Majid Bani-Yaghoub will be on research leave and will join the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the UMKC School of Medicine, with the goal of strengthening interdisciplinary collaborations in health informatics, infectious disease modeling, and data-driven healthcare research across UMKC.
2025
Graduate Students & Lab Members
- Barsha Saha (PhD Student)
- Barsha’s 2025 work examines infectious disease modeling under climate-change influences. She has recently submitted an article on differentiating between pathogen evolution and intervention effects.
Related research website: Barsha’s Research Hub. - Arash Arjmand (PhD Candidate)
Arash recently published work on machine learning and infection risk prediction in the Journal of Hospital Infection and a One Health study on biosecurity compliance.
Research website: Arash’s Research Hub | Google Scholar. - Kiel Corkran (PhD Candidate)
Kiel’s work includes Bayesian estimation of hospital MRSA transmission and large-scale modeling of infection spread across nursing home networks, with two recent publications and manuscripts in preparation on hospital epidemiology and antimicrobials.
Research website: Kiel’s Research Hub - Bryan Harris (PhD Student)
Bryan submitted work to the Health Informatics Journal on leveraging genomic metadata to extract epidemiologically meaningful patterns. Bryan's work bridges computational biology and health data science. See the preprint - Julia Pluta (PhD Student)
Julia’s research integrates health equity with mathematical modeling of nursing homes and spatial cluster analysis for public health surveillance. Her work continues to expand on equity-centered modeling methods. - Mohammed Alanazi (PhD Candidate)
Mohammed’s contributions include the analysis of delayed reaction–diffusion models and a novel LCT–SINDy framework for identifying distributed-delay dynamics, which is under review at the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems. Mohammed's Research Hub - Priscilla Sekyere (PhD Student)
Priscilla published a reaction–diffusion model of vascular tumor growth and is expanding her research into Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for cancer modeling and data analysis.
Research website: Priscilla’s Research Hub
Undergraduate Researchers
- Sam Golladay (Undergraduate Researcher)
In April 2025, Sam presented his research at UMKC’s Symposium of Undergraduate Research & Creative Scholarship (SEARCH). His project, Evaluating the Accuracy of Large Language Models on Mathematics Competition Problems, examined how leading AI systems (such as GPT-4 and Gemini) perform on advanced problem-solving tasks. Manuscript submitted to ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. - Gianna Cado (Math Graduate)
Gianna completed an honors thesis, Using Mathematical Models to Analyze the Spread of Antimicrobial-Resistant Escherichia coli Between Farms and Communities, using compartmental models and simulations to assess transmission dynamics and intervention effectiveness.
Selected News Prior to 2025
Infectious Disease & One Health Research
- Virtual Laboratory of Pathogen Transmission in Healthcare (2022): Launch of a collaborative effort focused on pathogen transmission among healthcare workers and settings.
- UMKC news feature
- One Health Modeling and Antimicrobial Resistance (2022): Research initiative seeking new modeling tools to combat antimicrobial-resistant organisms.
BioNexus KC feature - COVID-19 Research by the Numbers (2020): Math and statistics students at UMKC began studying the potential spread of COVID-19 in January 2020, contributing to early quantitative insights during the pandemic.
UMKC news story
Community-Engaged & Public-Facing Research
- Mathematics and Music (2018): Dr. Bani and his Math 406 students collaborated with the Kansas City Art Institute for an Interdisciplinary exploration of connections between music, sound, mathematics, and art, inspired by Gottfried Leibniz’s observation that “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
This work included numerical simulations of PDE-based models related to different musical instruments and an Artist-in-Residence collaboration during Folk Alliance International (FAI).
Video highlight 1 | Video highlight 2 - Community Data Analysis Project (2017):
Correlation analysis of water rates and water shutoffs in Kansas City, featured in KCPT’s documentary Public Works – Water Rates & Rivers.
Watch the documentary segment | UMKC feature (archived)
Student Scholarship & Community Platforms
- RooMath News: An ongoing student- and faculty-focused platform highlighting accomplishments in mathematics and statistics at UMKC, including upcoming events, advice for math majors, math-related articles, puzzles, and outreach activities.
Visit RooMath News - Mathematics & Statistics Research Day (MSRD): An annual event providing a platform for students and faculty to publicly present research and scholarly activities in mathematics and statistics.
MSRD Website