2025 – 2026 Year in Review
What a year for the Duke BIG IDEAs Lab!
From August 2025 through May 2026, our team advanced research at the intersection of biomedical engineering, data science, digital health, and wearable technology while celebrating major student milestones, national recognition, new publications, community engagement, and exciting next steps for our trainees and alumni.
This year, our lab’s work in wearable technology and digital biomarkers continued to gain momentum. We shared new resources for predicting glucose levels, highlighted the Digital Biomarker Discovery Pipeline as an example of community-based innovation, and celebrated a new publication in Nature Health examining how daylight saving time affects physical activity patterns. Our research was also featured across Duke and national outlets, including stories on wearables for proactive health monitoring, smartwatch privacy, diabetes management, and daily step count patterns.
The BIG IDEAs Lab also had a strong presence at major conferences and research gatherings. Lab members presented and connected with the broader biomedical engineering and digital health communities at BMES 2025, IEEE-EMBS BHI 2025, BSN 2025, JupyterCon 2025, the Duke Summit on AI for Health Innovation, ML4H Machine Learning for Health Symposium, and the HPI Digital Health Innovation Forum in Germany. These events gave our team opportunities to share research on wearable data, missingness, digital biomarkers, patient-generated health data, and AI-enabled health innovation.
We were thrilled to celebrate many well-deserved honors this year. Dr. Jessilyn Dunn received tenure and was awarded the IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award, named Associate Director of Wearable Technology for Duke’s Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation, and selected as a 2026 Bass Chair. Lab members and mentees also earned major recognitions, including Hayoung Jeong’s F31, Perisa Ashar’s ACM SIGHPC Computational & Data Science Fellowship and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Anita Shlesinger’s Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar selection, Dr. Shekh Md Mahmudul Islam’s Postdoctoral Professional Development Award, and Harrison Kane’s Howard G. Clark Award.
This was also a year of growth and transition for our students and alumni. Karnika Singh successfully defended her PhD dissertation, and we celebrated the BIG IDEAs Lab Class of 2026, including graduates across Biomedical Engineering, Statistical Science, Interdisciplinary Data Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science.
Beyond research and awards, our lab continued building community. We launched a new website, participated in Discover Engineering @ Duke during the North Carolina Science Festival, and celebrated the people who make BIG IDEAs Lab a collaborative and supportive place to learn, build, and grow.
Looking back, the 2025–2026 academic year reflected what makes BIG IDEAs Lab special: rigorous science, creative engineering, interdisciplinary collaboration, mentorship, and a shared commitment to improving health through data-driven discovery. We are grateful to our students, postdocs, staff, collaborators, alumni, and community partners for making this year so meaningful.
Congratulations to everyone who contributed to an incredible year. We cannot wait to see what comes next.
