Team
Principal Investigator
Dr. Fiona Kolbinger, MD
Fiona is a physician by training and joined Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as a Research Assistant Professor in 2023. She holds secondary affiliations with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) at Purdue University, the Department of Surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at Indiana University, and the Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery at the University Hospital Dresden, Germany. Fiona completed her doctorate at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany in 2019 and has since conducted translational research at the intersection of surgery and data science. Her works aim to develop computational tools for personalized treatment in surgery and interventional medicine and to evaluate the clinical value of these tools in early-phase clinical trials. Fiona's publications are listed on Google Scholar and Pubmed.
Researchers
Muhammad Ibtsaam Qadir, BE
Ibtsaam joined the team in May 2024 as a graduate researcher in Biomedical Engineering. He completed his undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2023. His research focuses on deep learning-based analysis of medical imaging and multimodal clinical data for the prediction of disease trajectories in patients with pancreatic disease. Find Ibtsaam's publications on Google Scholar and Pubmed.
Zheyuan (Scott) Zhang, MSc
Scott joined the lab in August 2024 as a graduate researcher in Biomedical Engineering. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University in Haining, China and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed his master's degree at Johns Hopkins University in 2024. Building on his experience in surgical image analysis, his research focuses on surgical video understanding for intraoperative surgical decision support and quality assurance. Scott's publications are listed on Google Scholar and Pubmed.
Natasha Gundapanemi, BS
Natasha studies Electrical and Computer Engineering and joined the lab in August 2024. Following the completion of her undergraduate studies at Purdue University in 2025, she is now a master student in our lab. In her research, Natasha uses qualitative and quantitative methods to increase the explainability and clinical value of computational surgical video analysis models. She is co-advised by Prof. Vijay Gupta at the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.
Evan Zhang, BS
Evan is a medical student at Indiana University West Lafayette and is part of the Biomedical Engineering scholarly concentration. He finished his undergraduate in Biochemistry with a minor in Computer Science at the Ohio State University in 2023. In our lab, Evan's research focuses on quality improvement and complication risk stratification in patients undergoing cardiac interventions. Evan joined the team in September 2024.
Maria Moreano
Maria is a Biomedical Engineering undergraduate student with an interest in histopathologic image analysis. She is part of the team since August 2025 and works on digital pathology data from Purdue's veterinary clinic to identify differences and commonalities in disease patterns across various species.
Medha Belwadi
Medha studies Computer Science and joined the team in August 2025. She is interested in computational analysis of various types of medical imaging data, including endoscopic and histopathological data. In our lab, Medha's research aims to make AI models for laparoscopic surgical video understanding more explainable.
Sanshray Kumar
Sanshray studies Computer Science at Purdue University and joined the lab in January 2025. He supports our team's surgical video analysis pipeline.
Steven Kiss
Steven is a Computer Science student at Purdue University with a concentration in Machine Intelligence and a minor in Mathematics. Building on years of experience in computational data analysis, his research in our lab currently focuses on the prediction of clinical outcomes after pancreatic surgery from multimodal preoperative data. Steven joined the team in August 2025.
Associate Lab Members
Dr. Matthias Carstens, MD
Matthias joined the lab in 2020 as a medical doctoral student and defended his thesis in 2024 (magna cum laude). He is now a surgeon scientist at the Technical University Dresden, Germany. His research focuses on the compilation and analysis of large-scale datasets of laparoscopic imaging for intraoperative decision support. Matthias is specifically interested in improving the efficiency and value of expert annotations. In addition, he is interested in human-AI interaction and investigates the usability of intraoperative surgical decision support systems. Find Matthias on Pubmed.
Kevin Pfeiffer
Kevin is a medical doctoral student at the Technical University Dresden and is co-advised by Prof. Jakob Kather at the Technical University Dresden. Building on years of programming experience, Kevin focuses on the practical implementation of decentralized AI methods, such as Swarm Learning.
Hanna Schmeiser
Hanna joined the team as a medical doctoral student in 2022. Her doctoral research focuses on the prediction of postoperative pancreatic fistula after distal pancreatectomy based on multimodal preoperative and intraoperative data. Hanna is co-advised by Prof. Marius Distler at the Technical University Dresden.
Alumni
Dr. Sophie-Caroline Schwarzkopf, BSc, MD was a medical doctoral student and a clinician scientist in our group from 2021-2024. She conducted research on educational serious gaming applications in the context of surgical patient care and postoperative complications. Sophie defended her doctoral thesis in 2023 (summa cum laude). Her published works are listed on Pubmed.
Thomas Nielen was a medical doctoral student in our group from 2020-2022 and conducted research on functional outcomes after rectal cancer surgery. Find Thomas on Pubmed.
Dr. Franziska Rinner, MD was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2020-2022 and conducted research on intraoperative surgical decision support. She defended her thesis at the Technical University Dresden in 2024 (summa cum laude). Find Fanny’s published works on Pubmed.