Belinda S. Akpa, PhD


Associate Professor and Director of Data Sciences & AI


Headshot of Belinda Akpa. She smiles at the camera, wearing a white dress.
I use computational approaches to accelerate the discovery of explanatory bio-models and support biological decision making under mechanistic uncertainty. Within this overarching theme, my work has the following three emphases: (1) the type of challenge: ‘tiny-data’ modeling (2) the type of process: integrative, iterative collaboration with experimental biologists; and (3) the desired outcome: multiscale hypothesis formulation for targeted biological experiments and actionable insights for design and intervention. 
 
Current Roles
  • Associate Professor, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering – Leading a federally funded research program in quantitative systems physiology, spanning plant and human systems 
  • Director of Data Sciences and AI, National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems
  • Systems Modeling Lead, ATOM Consortium – Developing quantitative systems pharmacology strategies to predict human-level therapeutic outcomes for AI-driven drug discovery
Education and Training
  • PhD in Chemical Engineering with Advanced Chemical Engineering Practice, University of Cambridge/Cambridge-MIT Institute (UK)
  • MEng (Hons, First Class) Chemical Engineering, University of Cambridge (UK)
  • BA (Hons) in Chemical Engineering, University of Cambridge (UK)
Prior Roles
  • Senior Research Scientist, Biosciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  • Assistant Professor of Integrated Synthetic & Systems Biology, Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program & Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences, North Carolina State University
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago
Leadership philosophy
Leadership is intentionally establishing norms that allow others to bring their full selves into a space such that a group of individuals becomes more than the sum of their parts – augmenting the group’s ability to identify and achieve collective goals, while respecting the lived experience, motivations, and aspirations of individual members.
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