Predicting your risk of illness

Researcher envisions a future where a personal device could be used to monitor that individual’s risk factor, thereby changing the field of preventive medicine.

Imagine a future when you could predict whether or not you are at risk of becoming sick. U-M professor Alfred Hero is working to make that a reality with his research into the human genome’s response to viral illnesses. Hero’s group is working to build a mathematical algorithm that can predict whether or not an individual is susceptible to a virus. He envisions a future where a personal device could be used to monitor that individual’s risk factor, thereby changing the field of preventive medicine.

ABOUT THE PROFESSOR: Alfred Hero is the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering. He works in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering departments at the University of Michigan. His research interests include probabilistic models for high dimensional datasets, graphical models for multivariate data and information theoretic surrogates for signal and image processing.