Tyler Ward
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Engineering Sciences
Morehead State University
About
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Engineering Sciences at Morehead State University (MSU). At MSU, I direct the MEDUSA (Medical Empowerment Through Digital Health, User-Centric Systems, and Artificial Intelligence) Lab, and co-direct the Virtual Reality and Automation Lab with Dr. Kouroush Jenab.
My research interests, while diverse, generally fall into the domain of applied artificial intelligence (AI). During my Ph.D., I focused on developing novel prompt-driven segmentation models for adaptive and data-efficient medical image analysis. Prior to my Ph.D., I was more interested in building object detection models for pedestrian and animal detection and tracking for autonomous vehicles, as well as crop detection in smart agriculture systems. I also have extensive research experience in industrial machine learning, with a particular focus on quality, reliability, and maintenance.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky in August 2026 working under Dr. Abdullah-Al-Zubaer Imran in the Computational Health, Imaging, and Learning Laboratory (CHILL). I received my M.S. in Engineering & Technology Management from MSU in May 2023, and my B.S. in Computer Science from the same institution in May 2021.
News/Updates
Oct 2026: Pleased to announce that the MEDUSA Lab has had two abstracts accepted to the Kentucy Academy of Science Annual Meeting! The first work, sole-authored by me, is titled "Joint modeling of lesion and annotator characteristics in skin lesion analysis". The second work, first-authored by my first-ever URF, Brady Adkins, is titled a "A preliminary investigation into characterizing trauma discourse within online support communities". Congratulations to Brady!
Oct 2026: Pleased to welcome Jude Hall to my group as an Honors student researcher. Jude's work will focus on designing AI methods to detect errors in electronic health records (EHRs)!
Sep 2026: Pleased to welcome Alexander Meade to my group as a volunteer researcher. Alex's work will focus on designing AI and advanced brain function representation techniques to better detect Alzheimer's disease from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI)!
Sep 2026: Pleased to be awarded the Kentucky Commercialization Ventures Innovation Fellowship!!
Aug 2026: Our paper ABFR-KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Functional Brain Analysis has been accepted at Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging!
Aug 2026: Pleased to welcome Alex Mahar to my research group at MSU as a volunteer researcher. Alex's work will focus on AI methods that incorporate radiomic information for improved medical image analysis.
Jul 2026: Pleased to welcome Brady Adkins and Chloe Cantrell to my research group at MSU as Undergraduate Research Fellows (URFs). Brady's work will focus on the design of AI methods to characterize trauma discourse from online support communitites to improve clinical understanding, while Chloe's work will focus on improving the realism, safety, and fairness of synthetic prolonged exposure therapy data.
Jul 2026: I have officially passed my dissertation defense and become Dr. Ward!
Apr 2026: I gave a guest lecture to the CS 509: Computer and Data Ethics class at the University of Kentucky titled "Do No Harm: or, How to Stop the Medical Industry From Killing Patients with AI Nonsense".
Apr 2026: Pleased to announce that I will be joining the faculty of Morehead State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Engineering Sciences. Following the completion of my PhD, this position will transfer to tenure-track Assistant Professor.
Apr 2026: I gave a talk titled "Promptable Segmentation for Adaptive and Data-Efficient Medical Image Analysis" at the Department of Computer Science's Keeping Current Seminar at the University of Kentucky.