Rickey Patel
I study how artificial intelligence is reshaping the workforce and labor markets. My work combines large-scale job posting data, NLP, and GCP-native pipelines to surface how AI is changing the skills employers need — and who gets left out. I hold an M.S. in Information Science from Penn State (2025) and am pursuing a D.Eng. advised by Dr. Satish M. Srinivasan.
Research
My doctoral research, advised by Dr. Satish M. Srinivasan, examines AI's role in labor market transformation. I build production ETL pipelines on GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Storage) to collect and analyze longitudinal employer skill demand data, applying BERTopic and LDA to extract occupational skill signals and identify curriculum gaps between what institutions teach and what the labor market actually needs.
A parallel research thread focuses on the digital labor market for spiritual facilitation roles — chaplains, clergy, and pastoral staff. Drawing on IRS, Census, USDA, and SerpAPI data across national, state, and metro architectures, I found an inverse correlation of r = −0.402 (p = 0.038) between digital labor market participation and household income across 27 states, pointing to persistent structural inequities in who benefits from digital labor platforms.
Earlier work on healthcare workforce equity — how clinical AI reshapes the skill profiles of roles from diagnostics to telemedicine — produced a 2025 NABET Best Paper Award co-authored with Dr. Srinivasan. That project also developed an XAI ethics-by-design framework with fairness audits and real-time streaming pipelines.
Methods & Tools
Publications
Building Trust in AI: Ethical Deployment and Regulatory Oversight in Healthcare
National Association for Business, Economics, and Technology (NABET) Annual Conference · Presenting 2026
Presenting 2026Impact and Current State of Artificial Intelligence in the Religious Market
National Association for Business, Economics, and Technology (NABET) Annual Conference · Presenting 2026
Presenting 2026Impact of AI in Healthcare
National Association for Business, Economics, and Technology (NABET) Annual Conference · Co-authored with Dr. Satish M. Srinivasan
🏆 Best Paper AwardProjects
Job Postings Intelligence Pipeline
A fully GCP-native pipeline collecting job postings across CS, MBA, Data Analytics, and AI domains from USAJobs and Jooble, scoring relevance, and mapping every role to O*NET 24.2 competency frameworks. Migrated from a Google Colab notebook to Cloud Run, BigQuery, and Cloud Scheduler, with a nine-phase interactive analytics dashboard and GitHub Actions auto-deploy.
Digital Labor Market Analysis — Spiritual Facilitation
A multi-source pipeline integrating IRS, Census, USDA, and SerpAPI data to track digital labor market participation among chaplains, pastors, clergy, and related roles across national, state, and metro geographies. Found an inverse correlation of r = −0.402 (p = 0.038) between digital labor ratio and household income across 27 states — revealing structural inequities in who benefits from digital labor platforms.
CSC 894: Healthcare AI Capstone
A graduate-level Computer Science capstone course built around a real healthcare AI application deployed on Google Cloud Platform. Students work end-to-end with production GCP services, culminating in a deployed AI system with equity and clinical stewardship considerations built into the design rubric.
Timeline
Two Papers Accepted · NABET 2026
Presenting "Building Trust in AI: Ethical Deployment and Regulatory Oversight in Healthcare" and "Impact and Current State of Artificial Intelligence in the Religious Market"
NABET Best Paper Award
AI's impact on healthcare workforce — co-authored with Dr. Satish M. Srinivasan
Graduate Certificate · Business Process Integration · Penn State Great Valley
IT system analysis, architecture, design, and implementation for business process needs
Graduate Certificate · Cyber Threat Analytics & Prevention · Penn State Great Valley
Cyberattack analysis, cyber law, vulnerability assessment, threat detection and mitigation
M.S., Information Science · Penn State
GPA 3.73 · Capstone: Real-time clinical decision support using Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Deep Learning
Research Assistant to Dr. Satish M. Srinivasan · The Pennsylvania State University
AI in the workforce and labor markets · D.Eng. dissertation research
D.Eng. Candidate · The Pennsylvania State University
AI & Workforce Analytics · Graduate Certificate in Engineering Leadership & Innovation Management (in progress)
Patient Services Associate / Care Coordinator · Asembia · ASPN Pharmacies
Specialty medication access coordination in full HIPAA compliance; reduced prescription processing time 30% and prior authorization turnaround 25%
B.S., Information Sciences & Technology · Penn State Abington
GPA 3.89 · Concentration: Human Physiology & Biology
Contact
I'm happy to talk about AI and labor markets, research collaboration, or graduate coursework in applied AI. Say hi.