I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, advised by Noémie Elhadad, and a Visiting Postgraduate Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Recently, I joined the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Student Editorial Board. My PhD is funded by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) through a Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Research training grant (T15LM007079). I am also a recipient of the Computational and Data Science Fellowship from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group in High Performance Computing (SIGHPC).
My primary research area leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and causal inference methods to improve the equity, quality, and safety of health care and support knowledge discovery in medicine. Generally, my research interests concern examining and supporting clinical cognition and decision making; assessing disease risk, presence, progression, and treatment; identifying disease subtypes and biomarkers associated with important outcomes; and studying the fairness, accountability, and transparency of intelligent systems in the health care setting. I am especially passionate about using and expanding the vast toolbox that statistical and computational learning offers to better understand, improve, and facilitate study of the health of underserved communities.
Before starting my PhD program, I held a number of positions at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). While at BWH and HMS, I served on more than a dozen research studies and would eventually develop my own projects with generous support from Harvard Catalyst, the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program funded by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
Prior to pursuing a career in medicine and health services research, I was a member of the Strategic Information division of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) at Harvard University, which aimed to rapidly expand antiretroviral therapy (ART) treatment and care programs for people living with HIV/AIDS in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Botswana. As Data Quality Assurance Manager for the Nigeria country program, my focus was scale-up and transition of data quality improvement and assurance activities nationwide. In this capacity, I worked closely with in-country quality improvement, monitoring and evaluation, and clinical specialists while developing or assisting with the modification of pediatric and adult quality improvement dashboards and monitoring and evaluation tools for over 175,000 patients. My division also generated monitoring and evaluation reports for the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS).