Vaishnavi Sridharan

Vaishnavi is a fourth-year PhD Student in Kinesiology. She has completed her masters in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Loughborough University and has worked as a psychologist in India. Her research interest include conducting mindfulness based interventions and exploring its effects on stress-resilience. Outside research, she enjoys swimming, and badminton. Currently her goal is to get a paragliding certificate!

Mojtaba Khaliji

Mojtaba is a doctoral student studying Community Health who completed his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering – Control at University of Tabriz and his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering – Telecommunications at Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic). His research interests include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Optimization and Evolutionary Computation, Education, and Behavioral Science. His concentration is on improving quality of life for people with chronic conditions including multiple sclerosis (MS). Outside research, he enjoys good food, good company, good conversations, and good art and literature, not necessarily in this order!

Sajib Zaman

Sajib was a licensed dentist in Bangladesh. He became involved in public health and research with a motivation to have an impact on larger population groups. After working on several community-based health research projects for hard-to-reach and marginalized populations, he started his doctoral study here at UIUC. His research interests include exploring modalities of health service uptake, through technology-based interventions and implementation research.

Kortney Wilcher

Kortney is a first year PhD student in Community Health. She also holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Community Health. Her research interests include health across the life course and the social-ecological effects of participatory research and knowledge translation on health exposures and outcomes among minoritized communities and individuals with disabilities and chronic conditions.

Huaijin Xu

Jin is a third-year Ph.D. student in Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research primarily focuses on two areas: (1) Childhood Obesity: We have completed a study examining the prevalence of childhood obesity using various body composition and anthropometric cutoff criteria. The future direction of this research involves employing machine learning techniques to predict childhood obesity and evaluate the efficacy of different machine learning models. (2) Mental Health and Healthy Behaviors: We have investigated the relationships between multiple healthy behaviors and depression in people with and without disabilities. The next phase of this study will explore how these healthy behaviors relate to chronic stress in these populations. Outside research, she loves skating, skiing, dancing, and singing.