UNLV — DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Fonseca
Research Group

We build AI-driven systems at the intersection of public health, biomedical science, and computer science — led by Dr. Jorge Ramón Fonseca Cacho, Assistant Professor at UNLV.

$7.4M+
Active Funding (NIH, NSF, ADDF)
30
Peer-Reviewed Publications
2,200+
Citations · H-Index 12
31+
Active Student Researchers
Research Areas
🧠
AI & Large Language Models
Deploying and fine-tuning models like LLaMA for biomedical text analysis and clinical data extraction.
🔬
Neurodegenerative Disease
Alzheimer's drug development tracking, biomarker discovery, and clinical trial observatory platforms.
📄
NLP & OCR
Post-processing degraded historical documents, structured data extraction, and document understanding.
🏥
Public Health Technology
Epidemiological surveillance systems, including wastewater-based monitoring for COVID-19 and other pathogens.
🥽
Augmented & Virtual Reality
Spatial navigation applications and AR/VR environments for research and accessibility use cases.
♻️
Reproducible Research
Standards and tooling for computational reproducibility across interdisciplinary research pipelines.
Projects
Alzheimer's Disease Biomarker Observatory
AI-powered platform tracking biomarker utilization across Alzheimer's clinical trials. Uses a dual-LLM architecture to monitor 138+ drugs across 182 trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. Funded by ADDF ($2M, 2024–2029).
alz.unlv.edu ↗
NV Empower
Wastewater-based epidemiological surveillance platform monitoring COVID-19 and recreational drug trends across Nevada.
empower.unlv.edu ↗
App Development Team
Student-led team building research tools and community-facing applications. Open to UNLV students across disciplines.
appdev.cs.unlv.edu ↗
Drone Simulation & AI Navigation
Computer vision-based autonomous navigation systems using drone simulation environments and deep learning models.
$7.4M+
Active research funding from the NIH, NSF, and the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) across grants running 2021–2029. Projects span biomedical AI, public health surveillance, and computational science infrastructure.
Team
PHD STUDENTS Jesse Ortega
PHD STUDENTS Gaurab Subedi
PHD STUDENTS Shreem Arjyal
PHD STUDENTS Dat Nguyen
MASTER'S STUDENTS 15 active researchers
UNDERGRADUATES 12+ contributors

Interested in joining? Reach out by email.