Joseph D. Romano

Joseph D. Romano serves as Assistant Professor of Informatics and Pharmacology within the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, leading a research program focused on artificial intelligence applications for predicting chemical toxicity and advancing drug discovery.

His core research interests include:

• Translational Bioinformatics for biomedical data integration
• Environmental Toxicology mechanisms and prediction
• Biomedical Artificial Intelligence with emphasis on interpretability

Romano's laboratory develops computational frameworks leveraging knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and automated machine learning to model chemical-biological interactions. Current projects address toxicology prediction, drug-target affinity modeling, and venom-derived therapeutic discovery through multi-omics integration and semantic knowledge representation.

Analysis of his 2022-2025 publications reveals consistent innovation in applying graph-based machine learning to toxicology and pharmacology challenges, with particular strengths in knowledge-guided deep learning for interpretable toxicity prediction and federated approaches for clinical data analysis.

His research group maintains active development of open-source tools including ComptoxAI for automated predictive toxicology and VenomKB for computational toxinology, supporting collaborative advances in environmental health and drug safety assessment.