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Parisa Rashidi, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received UF’s Excellence Award for Assistant Professors for 2019. The award is one of the university’s top honors for a junior faculty member.

Rashidi is the director of the “Intelligent Health Lab” (i-Heal). Her area of research includes developing machine learning and artificial intelligence methods for solving healthcare problems. More specifically, she is working on transforming patient care in the Intensive Care Unit by developing autonomous monitoring tools using advanced machine learning techniques, as well as developing intelligent tools for monitoring community-dwelling patients. She has forged a highly collaborative research program across campus to address these problems, and is collaborating with several departments at the College of Medicine. Over the past few years, she has received $10.6M in extramural research funds with collaborators and $3.05M as an individual investigator. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), state grants, and internal grants.

Rashidi has many notable accomplishments during her time at UF. In 2018, she received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. In 2019, she was selected to receive a three-year University of Florida Term Professorship, and was awarded a National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) Trailblazer Award for autonomous pain assessment in ICU patients.

There are more than 500 tenure-track assistant professors at UF, and Rashidi is one of only 10 to receive a 2019 Excellence Award for Assistant Professors.