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Divya Sharma

Senior Biostatistician
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
University Health Network

Assistant Professor
Dalla Lana School of Public Health
University of Toronto

Address : Biostatistics Division
                    610 University Ave, Toronto
Email: div [dot] sharma [at] utoronto [dot] ca      
Lab page: Biostatistics Division, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
Linked In Page: Linked In profile
Google Scholar page: Profile

           About me              Research Interests           Education                Publications          Work Experience     Teaching  

About me

I am working as a senior biostatistician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre where I lead Machine learning projects at the Biostatistics Department. I am working on developing machine learning models using genomic, microbiome, image and clinical data in the area of cancer research. Our group also provides ML based consultancy to research groups within University Health Network. Prior to this role, I worked as a Scientific Associate at the Toronto General Hospital, UHN in the field of application of Machine Learning to Gastroenterology and genomic studies in collaboration with Dr. Johane Allard , Dr. Wei Xu and Dr. Wendy Lou . I have also completed 2.5 years of postdoctoral research training at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network and the University of Toronto under the co-supervision of Dr. Wei Xu. I am also serving as an Assistant Professor at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto , where I mainly teach about application of Machine Learning techniques to health data and clinical studies.

As a part of my postdoctoral research, I have worked towards developing novel neural network models in the area of disease prediction using microbiome data, in collaboration with Dr. Andrew D. Paterson (The Hospital of Sick Children). With Dr. Bhat , we are working on using Machine Learning tools in liver disease detection and analysis. I have been awarded the CIHR STAGE (Strategic Training for Advanced Genetic Epidemiology) fellowship (2020-2022). I aim to extend my research to medical image analysis along with genomic data analysis to aid interdisciplinary research in the areas of Computer Science and Health Research.
Prior to my postdoctoral experience, I completed my PhD from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Jodhpur under the supervision of Dr. Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay. My area of research for my PhD was Content Based Retrieval in images and sketches.

Research Interests

Education

Teaching and Supervision

Publications      

Journal

  1. Divya Sharma, Wendy Lou, Wei Xu; “phylaGAN: Data augmentation through Conditional GANs and Autoencoders for improving disease prediction accuracy using microbiome data”; Bioinformatics, Apr 2024

  2. Katherine Schwenger, Divya Sharma , et al.;” Links between gut microbiome, metabolome, clinical variables and NAFLD severity in bariatric patients”, Liver International, Jan 2024

  3. Divya Sharma, Wei Xu; “ReGeNNe: Regularized Genetic Pathway-based deep learning method using neural network and canonical correlation for disease prediction”; Bioinformatics, Oct 2023

  4. Yasaman Ghorbani, Katherine Schwenger, Divya Sharma> al.; “Effect of Fecal Microbial Transplant via colonoscopy in obese subjects: a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial”; Diabetes Obesity and Metabolism, July 2022

  5. Divya Sharma (co-first author), Amirhossein Azhie, et al.; “A Deep Learning Framework for Personalized Dynamic Diagnosis of Graft Fibrosis after Liver Transplantation using Longitudinal Data”; Lancet Digital Health, April 2023

  6. Amanpreet Brar, Alice Zhu, Divya Sharma et al.; “Development of Diagnostic and Prognostic Molecular Biomarkers in Hepatocellular Carcinoma using Machine Learning: A Systematic Review and Integrative Analysis”, Nov 2022, Liver Cancer International

  7. Neta Gotlieb, Amirhossein Azhie, Divya Sharma, Ashley Spann, Suo Nan-Ji, Jason Tran, Ani Orchanian-Cheff, Bo Wang, Anna Goldenberg and Mamatha Bhat; "The Promise of Machine Learning Applications in Solid Organ Transplantation",   npj Digital Medicine, June 2022

  8. Sabri Soussi, Divya Sharma, Peter Jüni, Gerald Lebovic, Laurent Brochard, John C Marshall, Patrick R Lawler, Margaret Herridge, Niall Ferguson, Lorenzo Del Sorbo, Elodie Feliot, Alexandre Mebazaa, Erica Acton, Jason N Kennedy, Wei Xu, Etienne Gayat, Claudia C Dos Santos; "Identifying clinical subtypes in sepsis-survivors with different one-year outcomes: a secondary latent class analysis of the FROG-ICU cohort",   Critical Care, April 2022

  9. Daljeet Chahal, Divya Sharma, Sareh Keshavarzi, Fakhar Ali Qazi Arisar, Keyur Patel, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "Distinctive Clinical and Genetic Features of Lean vs Overweight Fatty Liver Disease using the UK Biobank",   Hepatology International, January 2022

  10. Jason Tran, Divya Sharma, Neta B. Gotlieb, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "Application of Machine Learning in Liver Transplantation: A Review",   Hepatology International, January 2022

  11. Divya Sharma, Neta B. Gotlieb, Michael Farkouh, Keyur Patel, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "Machine Learning Approach to Classify Cardiovascular Disease in Patients with NAFLD in the UK Biobank Cohort",   Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), December 2021

  12. Divya Sharma, Wei Xu; "phyLoSTM: A Novel Deep Learning model on Disease Prediction from Longitudinal Microbiome Data",   Bioinformatics journal, June 2021

  13. Divya Sharma, Andrew D. Paterson, Wei Xu; "TaxoNN: Ensemble of Neural Networks on Stratified Microbiome Data for Disease Prediction,   Bioinformatics, DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa542 , May 2020.

  14. Divya Sharma, Nitin Gupta, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay, Sameep Mehta; "A Novel Feature Transform Framework Using Deep Neural Network for Multimodal Floor Plan Retrieval",   International Journal of Document Analysis and Retrieval (IJDAR), July 2019. DOI: 10.1007/s10032-019-00340-1

  15. Divya Sharma, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay; "High-Level Feature Aggregation for Fine-Grained Architectural Floor Plan Retrieval", IET Computer Vision, March 2018. DOI: 10.1049/iet-cvi.2017.0581.

Conference Abstracts

  1. Divya Sharma, Wei Xu; "Deep Learning in microbiome: Hybrid CNN-LSTM model for disease prediction using longitudinal microbiome data", American Society of Human Genetics meeting (ASHG) 2021 (October 2021)

  2. Divya Sharma, Wei Xu; "Longitudinal Microbiome and Machine Learning: A CNN-LSTM based Neural Network Model for Disease Prediction", International Genetic Epidemiology Society (IGES) 2021 (October 2021)

  3. Neta B. Gotlieb, Divya Sharma, Michael Farkouh, Keyur Patel, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "Machine Learning Approach to Predict Cardiovascular Diseases in Patients with NAFLD in The UK Biobank Cohort", AASLD Liver Meeting 2021 (November 2021)

  4. Divya Sharma, Amirhossein Azhie, Priya Sheth, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "A Deep Learning Framework for Dynamic Diagnosis of Graft Fibrosis after Liver Transplantation Using Longitudinal Data", AASLD Liver Meeting 2021 (November 2021)

  5. Divya Sharma, Neta B. Gotlieb, Michael Farkouh, Keyur Patel, Wei Xu, Mamatha Bhat; "Machine Learning Approach to Predict Cardiovascular Diseases in Patients with NAFLD in The UK Biobank Cohort", Canadian Liver Meeting 2021 (May 2021), (ORAL)

  6. Divya Sharma, Andrew D. Paterson, Wei Xu; "Combining human and artificial intelligence: Ensemble of convolutional neural networks for disease prediction from microbiome data", International Genetic Epidemiology Society (IGES) 2020, Seoul, South Korea (July 2020), (ORAL, Neel Award Finalist)

Conference Full Papers

  1. Divya Sharma, Gaurav Harit, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay ; "Attributed paths for layout-based document retrieval", 4th Workshop on Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR), Hyderabad, India (December 2018), DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-9361-7_2

  2. Divya Sharma, Nitin Gupta, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Sameep Mehta; "REXplore: A Sketch based Interactive Explorer for Real Estates using Building Floor Plan Images", IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM 2018) , Taichung, Taiwan, December 2018, DOI: 10.1109/ISM.2018.00018

  3. Sahil Dhiman, Pushpinder Garg, Divya Sharma, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay ; "Automatic Synthesis of Boolean Expression and Error Detection from Logic Circuit Sketches", National Conference on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Graphics (NCVPRIPG 2017) , Mandi, India (Dec 2017) (ORAL), DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-0020-2_36

  4. Divya Sharma, Nitin Gupta, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Sameep Mehta; "DANIEL: A Deep Architecture for Automatic Analysis and Retrieval of Building Floor Plans", 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Kyoto, Japan (Nov 2017). DOI: 10.1109/ICDAR.2017.76

  5. Divya Sharma, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Gaurav Harit; "A Unified Framework for Semantic Matching of Architectural Floorplans", 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Cancun, Mexico (Dec 2016) (ORAL). DOI: 10.1109/ICPR.2016.7899999.

  6. Divya Sharma, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Gaurav Harit; "Retrieval of Architectural Floor plans based on Layout Semantics", Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Women in Computer Vision), Las Vegas, USA (June 2016).

Others

    Invited talk
  1. "Using Machine Learning to get ahead of disease: A Multi-Class Neural Network to Diagnose Graft Pathology in the Liver Transplant Recipient”, Nov 2023, Transplant AI Symposium, UHN

  2. “Deep Learning Models for Time Series Prediction and their Application to Longitudinal Microbiome Data”, The Biostatistics Seminar Series, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, November 2021.

  3. "Application of neural networks on disease prediction from longitudinal microbiome data ", The STAGE Seminar Series, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, June 2021.

  4. "Convolutional Neural Networks for Analysis and Prediction from Microbiome Data", The Biostatistics Seminar Series, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, February 2021.

  5. "Convolutional Neural Networks for Disease Prediction from Microbiome Data", George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation, University of Manitoba, Canada, September 2020.
    Poster Presentation
  6. Divya Sharma, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay and Gaurav Harit; "Analysis and Retrieval of Architectural Floor Plans", IAPR Summer School on Document Analysis: Document Informatics, Jaipur, India (January 2017).
    Doctoral Symposium
  7. Research work selected for presentation at Doctoral Symposium, 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Kyoto, Japan (Nov 2017)

Work Experience

Last updated: May, 2024