MIS Professor Gondy Leroy Assists the Entire Academic Pipeline

Gondy Leroy, professor of MIS and associate dean for research in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, is working with students of different levels—from high schoolers to doctoral students—as they conduct research in healthcare.

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Through BIO5’s Keep Engaging Youth in Science (KEYS) program, which offers research internships to high school students in Arizona, Leroy mentored high schoolers Akshita Khanna and Maanvik Poddar this summer. They used the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us database, a large health dataset intended to help researchers learn about disease and prevention, to study traumatic brain injuries and elder abuse. 

In the undergraduate space, Leroy will be assisting an honors student beginning this fall. This past year, she aided Eller student Skye Miller, who completed an honors thesis about generating images using generative AI to augment healthcare information, and Abby Whitlock, a physiology student at the U of A, who used the All of Us database to evaluate how to create relevant clinical data sets for machine learning. Both students had their work published as a peer-reviewed paper at the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics in June. 

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Leroy also works with master’s students Madhuri Kandula ‘24, Srikar Madipalli ’24 MIS and Phanidhiraj Padimiti ‘24 MIS, as well as doctoral students Arif Ahmed, Prosanta Barai and Chancellor Woolsey.

Mentoring such a broad range of students requires a bit of adaptation. 

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“I treat them all as researchers, but the expectations are different in terms of knowledge and what they can get done,” says Leroy.

And that’s not where it ends. Eller is planning a new initiative focused on interdisciplinary AI and data science projects for healthcare.

“We’re actually creating a new experiential learning program for Eller undergrads in the healthcare space,” says Leroy. 

The program is expected to launch in 2025.