The University of Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society has appointed Fang Liu, Notre Dame Collegiate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, as the director of the Health Data Exploration & Analytics Lab (HEAL), effective July 1, 2025.
In her new role, Liu oversees the research projects and scholarly direction of HEAL. She will lead the Lab’s mission to address human health issues through innovative data science and AI, fostering interdisciplinary research and collaboration with university researchers, stakeholders, and community partners.
As director, Liu also drives the Lab’s research priorities, including advancing innovative, AI-powered approaches to health challenges that promote human flourishing—through community co-creation, data-informed decision-making, and the development of scalable solutions and public policies that reduce health disparities and advance the Common Good.
“As director of the Health Data Exploration & Analytics Lab, I look forward to growing HEAL’s capacity to lead data and AI-driven research with trustworthy innovations aimed at addressing health challenges,” said Liu. “Data are a valuable resource and AI offers powerful tools for transforming health research, but they must be collected, curated, developed, and applied responsibly—our lab will focus on leveraging data and AI research to generate insights that are both impactful and trustworthy through informed decision-making by community and global leaders.”
A fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, Liu brings expertise in statistical machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and differential privacy — techniques used to draw meaningful conclusions from data while protecting individual privacy. Her interdisciplinary work spans applications in biostatistics, social science, and public health with collaborative projects on malaria prevention, diagnostic biomarker identification, rare diseases, and more.
“With her deep knowledge and a track record of innovative, interdisciplinary research, Fang is uniquely positioned to guide the Health Data Exploration & Analytics Lab,” said Nitesh Chawla, Lucy Family Institute founding director and Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. “We look forward to her leadership in driving rigorous, societally impactful work at the intersection of healthcare, data science, and AI.”
In 2021, Liu was highlighted in the University of Notre Dame’s Women Lead series.
To learn more about the HEAL, please visit the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society website.
Contact:
Christine Grashorn, Program Director, Engagement and Strategic Storytelling
Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society / University of Notre Dame
cgrashor@nd.edu / 574.631.4856
lucyinstitute.nd.edu / @lucy_institute
About the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
Guided by Notre Dame’s Mission, the Lucy Family Institute adventurously collaborates on advancing data-driven and artificial intelligence (AI) convergence research, translational solutions, and education to ethically address society’s vexing problems. As an innovative nexus of academia, industry, and the public, the Institute also fosters data science and AI access to strengthen diverse and inclusive capacity building within communities.