Dr. Bernstam holds the joint appointment of professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI), where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research, and at UTHealth Medical School. Bernstam is also the Director of the Biomedical Informatics Group at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS). His lab at CCTS created and maintains the UTHealth clinical data warehouse, which contains health data for over 400,000 patients. Bernstam is board-certified in internal medicine and continues to practice. His research focuses on clinical and translational informatics, specifically on information retrieval, consumer informatics and clinical decision support. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics. In 2004, Bernstam received the John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award, as voted by the SBMI student body. Bernstam completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship at Stanford Medical Informatics.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Bernstam at: Elmer.V.Bernstam@uth.tmc.edu
Juliana Brixey, PhD, MPH, RN, associate professor of biomedical informatics and nursing at UTHealth, has 30 years of professional experience as a nurse in nursing management and direct patient care, working in general and vascular surgery, in the recovery room and on a renal diabetes unit as a head nurse, administrator on duty, pheresis nurse, assistant head nurse and staff nurse. Her research interests include patient safety, interruptions in workflow and social media in distance education. Brixey was instrumental in creating the applied health informatics graduate program at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and previously served as the director of the program. Brixey became the director of inter-professional education at SBMI in November 2013, and her role with the applied master's program was taken over by the Office of Academic Affairs. Brixey has received awards for her role as an educator, a nurse and an informatician including the 2012 John P. McGovern Teaching Award. The award is given by SBMI students to the professor who they believe best supports student independent thought, develops student confidence in their area of study, and stimulates students’ quest for knowledge and professional development. She also was honored by the Texas Nursing Association District Nine as one of the 20 outstanding nurses of 2012 at the 22nd annual nursing celebration.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Brixey at: Juliana.J.Brixey@uth.tmc.edu
A native of South Africa, Dr. Cohen practiced medicine in a rural hospital setting in his home country. When dealing with patients with mental illness or behavioral issues, Cohen often found that essential patient information was not available when needed. This issue, along with a longstanding interest in computer technology, led Cohen to leave medicine and pursue a new career in informatics. Cohen’s research interests focus on distributional semantics, which involves using computers learn how things are related from electronic text. He is also interested in the thought processes of clinicians that relate to the commission of, and recovery from, medical errors. Cohen works in the SBMI facility for the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Health Care. He joined the SBMI in 2009, after teaching at Arizona State University.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Cohen at: Trevor.Cohen@uth.tmc.edu
Susan Fenton, PhD, RHIA, FAHIMA, joined UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) on June 1, 2013 as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics. She came to SBMI from Texas State University in San Marcos, where she was an assistant professor and co-director of the Institute for Health Information Technology. In November 2013, Fenton transitioned into the role of assistant dean for academic affairs, taking over the management responsibilities for the Office of Academic Affairs and helping the school acquire health informatics and information management education accreditation from CAHIIM for the applied health informatics program. Fenton’s research interests include workforce development, data management, ICD-10 implementation and health care associated infections. Her interest in workforce development was limited to health IT professionals, but she sees a need to develop new methods for healthcare professionals to learn how to use information technology effectively. As for health care associated infections, Fenton has a new project working with an industrial engineer who identifies failure points that result in HAIs. After the failure points are identified, they will determine the impact of the failure points on EHRs and documentation.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Fenton at: Susan.H.Fenton@uth.tmc.edu
Dr. Franklin came to SBMI in 2009 after teaching in the Cognitive Science Department at Rice University. She is interested in how cognition and communication interact and impact each other and how this plays out in a medical context. This has led Franklin to studying decision making in the emergency department, the use of electronic health records, and how people and computers interact in the health care field. She is also interested in research related to patient safety, usability and communication. Franklin teaches courses in cognitive engineering, computer-supported collaborative work, research methods and information and knowledge representation.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Franklin at: Amy.Franklin@uth.tmc.edu
Lex Frieden, MA, LLD (hon) is a professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and directs the Independent Living Research Utilization program at The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR) at Memorial Hermann. Best known for his contributions to the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Frieden suffered a spinal cord injury while in college and has used a wheelchair for more than 40 years. In March 2013, Frieden received a 2013 Henry Viscardi Achievement Award, which honors the accomplishments of people with disabilities on a global basis. Frieden has received two appointments as the University of Texas System Chancellor's Health Fellow for Disabilities. In 1974, he completed a one-year teaching fellowship in psychology at the University of Houston, and in 1972, he completed a two-year research internship in rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine.
Education
For more information, contact Mr. Frieden at: Lex.Frieden@uth.tmc.edu
Yang Gong, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and a graduate of the SBMI Health Informatics doctorate program. Gong also has a background in medicine and received his medical training in China. Gong has a disciplinary background and core interest in human factors, human-centered computing, patient safety information system, clinical communication and clinical decision support. Gong has published and presented at national/international conferences, including AMIA, Medinfo, AHIMA, HIMSSasia, HIMSS, HCI International etc.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Gong at: Yang.Gong@uth.tmc.edu
Education
For more information, contact Mr. Ishee at: Jonathan.M.Ishee@uth.tmc.edu
Dr. Iyengar has focused his research in bio-medical informatics Research & Development including mathematical/statistical modeling, algorithms, and software development across diverse areas such as biochemistry, immunohematology, endocrinology, oncology, orthopedics, neural imaging, and clinical trials. He has extensive software development experience, most recently with Palm OS and web technologies.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Iyengar at: M.Sriram.Iyengar@uth.tmc.edu
Dr. Johnson has been at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston since 1983. Dr. Johnson's Ph.D. is in educational psychology with specialization in research, statistics and human learning. Dr. Johnson has taught or advised hundreds of faculty and graduate students in design, development, implementation, analysis, interpretation and publication of education and health oriented research and evaluation studies. While at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Dr. Johnson has presented or published numerous scholarly papers concerning effective use of computers in education and research (e.g., Hypertutor Therapy for Interactive Instruction, Microcomputer-administered Research: What it means for Educational Researchers, Microcomputer as Teacher/Researcher in a Nontraditional Setting, "Randomized Comparisons Among Health Informatics Students Identify Hypertutorial Features as Improving Web-Based Instruction"). He authored the computer game BlockAIDS - The AIDS Education Game. More recently, Dr. Johnson has become a recognized expert in the area of Web-based courseware research and development. He has developed a theoretical framework for the design of Web-based instruction (WBI) called the HyperTutor Model. Dr Johnson's chief research efforts have focused on the production and evaluation of superior Web-based interdisciplinary learning environments while implementing evidence-based teaching (EBT) randomized control methodologies to evaluate WBI effects in the field. This research not only "bridges the gap", but integrates randomized teaching and learning research with teaching practice, maximizing internal and external validity, while providing a model for WBI research in diverse health, science, mathematics, engineering and technology learning environments. Dr. Johnson is a winner of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston/School of Health Information Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award and of the John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Johnson at: Craig.W.Johnson@uth.tmc.edu
Todd R. Johnson, PhD, is a professor of biomedical informatics at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI). Johnson’s efforts at SBMI are focused on the application of informatics in clinical settings, including quality and safety dashboards, visual analytics, clinical research informatics and big data for health care. His research uses cognitive science, computer science and human factors engineering to solve biomedical informatics problems. In 1991, Johnson received his PhD in artificial intelligence from The Ohio State University, after which, he continued his research at Ohio State as an associate professor in the Department of Pathology’s Laboratory for Knowledge Based Medical Systems. In 1998, Johnson came to SBMI as one of the founding faculty members and served for three years as the associate dean for academic affairs. Johnson left SBMI to join the faculty at the University of Kentucky in 2010, where he developed a new academic division of biomedical informatics and led the effort to transform clinical and translational science through the use of new digital methodologies. He rejoined the SBMI faculty as a professor on Nov. 1, 2013.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Johnson at: Todd.R.Johnson@uth.tmc.edu
Peter Killoran, MS, MD, holds a dual faculty appointment at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), serving as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and an assistant professor of anesthesiology at UTHealth Medical School. At SBMI, Killoran works to improve health care quality and safety through Health IT and biomedical informatics with the goal of achieving a positive impact on clinical decision making and ultimately, patient outcomes. Killoran works on the SHARPC project and collaborates on HIT and informatics projects with the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System. With his joint appointment, Killoran utilizes his skills as a clinician-informatician. He has implemented several protocols at other institutions that merge these two roles. As an active member of the Memorial Hermann Hospital Medical Informatics Committee, he championed the adoption of an electronic anesthesia information management system across the entire Memorial Hermann Hospital System. Additionally, he is on the eDocumentation Editorial Committee, which has been charged with the task of transitioning all clinical documentation from paper to an electronic format. Killoran believes that there is a tremendous need and opportunity for informatics expertise and data-driven techniques to improve the quality and safety of patient care.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Killoran at: Peter.V.Killoran@uth.tmc.edu
James Langabeer II, PhD, MBA, FHIMSS, joined UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) on March 15, 2014 as a professor of biomedical informatics. He has a dual appointment with SBMI and UTHealth Medical School’s Department of Emergency Medicine. He has spent most of his career focused on quality improvement in health care delivery. His research interests are in clinical systems of care, cardiovascular quality and analytics, and health information exchange with a passion for the intersection of health informatics, decision sciences and medicine. His career has involved hospital executive administration, technology startups and commercialization, management consulting, and health care research and teaching. Langabeer was the founding Chief Executive Officer of Greater Houston Healthconnect and has also served on the faculty of The University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston, Boston University and Baylor College of Medicine. Langabeer earned his PhD in decision sciences from the University of Lancaster (England) School of Business, a Doctor of Education in leadership from the University of Houston and an MBA from Baylor University. He is also an Emergency Medical Technician with Advanced Cardiac Life Support certifications, a Certified Management Accountant and a Fellow in the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Langabeer at: James.R.Langabeer@uth.tmc.edu
Sahiti Myneni, PhD, MSE, joined UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) on March 1, 2014 as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics. In 2009, Myneni came to SBMI as a research fellow and later started her PhD in health informatics, which she completed in the fall of 2013. Her research interests include consumer informatics, health-related social media analytics, data-driven digital health technologies and idea to product translation (mHealth device development and testing). Myneni's current research focuses on health-related online social network analysis that builds on qualitative, automated and quantitative methods, which enables the development of novel, informatics driven solutions in the domains of consumer and population health. In the future, she plans to extend her methodological application to other areas such as substance abuse, chronic disease management and cancer survivorship research. On the applications front, she will be developing, testing and implementing tailored behavioral interventions using advances in mHealth and persuasive computing.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Myneni at: Shaiti.Myneni@uth.tmc.edu
Dean F. Sittig, PhD, is a professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI). He currently serves on the American Medical Informatics Association board of directors and is a member of the UT-Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality & Safety. Additionally, Sittig is the lead investigator of the clinical summarization project within the Office of the National Coordinator’s Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Project at SBMI and the ONC funded SAFER: Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience. Sittig's research interests center on the design, development, implementation and evaluation of all aspects of clinical information systems (CIS), specifically measuring the impact of CIS on a large scale and improving understanding of both the factors that lead to the success of CIS as well as the unintended consequences associated with computer-based clinical decision support and provider order entry systems. He is particularly interested in ensuring the safe and effective use of technology in the clinical setting, using advanced clinical decision support interventions to improve the quality of care and patient safety while reducing the costs of healthcare and designing and developing the clinical knowledge required to create these advanced clinical decision support interventions. In 1992, he was elected as a fellow in The American College of Medical Informatics, and in 2009, he won the John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award as voted by the SBMI student body. Sittig has co-authored an extensive collection of books and has won the Health Information Management and Systems Society Book of the Year Award thrice.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Sittig at: Dean.F.Sittig@uth.tmc.edu
Dr. Smith holds a PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston's School of Biomedical Informatics. She also holds a BS in Microbiology from Eastern Kentucky University, and is also a medical technologist (medical laboratory scientist). Before entering graduate school, she obtained over 15 years of experience implementing, supporting, and managing information systems. She implemented systems for both St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center, and also worked in numerous capacities for several HIT vendors. After graduating from SBMI with her PhD, she joined The University of Texas at Austin’s post-baccalaureate Health IT certificate program, where she taught, advised, and mentored over 550 students. She taught the applied electronic health records course as well as the technical half of the Fundamentals of Health IT course, covering topics such as HL7, databases, digital vs. analog data, Boolean logic, and basic SQL queries. In addition to her teaching responsibilities there, she supported the 30-machine computer lab; mentored student poster projects; reviewed resumes; provided academic counseling; and participated in employer outreach sessions. She also taught BIO337 Introduction to Health Informatics each spring, which is a broad overview of biomedical informatics.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Smith at: Kimberly.A.Smith@uth.tmc.edu
Jingchun Sun, PhD, joined the faculty at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics on July 1, 2013 as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics. She came to SBMI from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where she worked as a research assistant professor. Sun’s research interests include bioinformatics, systems biology, network pharmacology, biological data integration and mining, and biological network reconstruction and mining. Sun is currently working on research projects related to network pharmacology, which includes drugs used to treat cancer, psychiatric disorder and addiction. Her future research will continue along those lines with an integration of clinical data mining for identifying critical molecules for drug treatment. Sun is working specifically on the grant “Repurposing Existing Drugs for Cancer Treatment using Electronic Health Records” under principal investigator and SBMI associate professor Hua Xu, PhD.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Sun at: Jingchun.Sun@uth.tmc.edu
Cui Tao, PhD, joined the SBMI faculty on July 22, 2013 as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics. She came to SBMI from the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics at Mayo Clinic. Tao’s background is in clinical informatics and computer science, and her research interests include ontologies, standard terminologies, semantic web, information extraction and integration as well as applying ontology and semantic web technologies to clinical and translational studies. Tao is currently involved in several federally funded research projects including projects that she's leading. These projects focus on temporal-relation modeling, extraction and reasoning; secondary use of electronic health record data for clinical and translational studies; ontology-based analysis for cancer drug repurposing; vaccine adverse event analysis; and ontology-based personalized decision support systems. Tao is the principal investigator of the Clinical Narrative Temporal Relation Ontology (CNTRO) project, in which she leverages ontology and semantic web technologies to model, extract and infer temporal relations from clinical data. She’s also leading the research efforts on common ontology guidelines for semantic representations, which is funded by NIH through the National Center of Biomedical Ontologies. Additionally, she is applying semantic web technologies on normalized electronic data for clinical decision support, which is funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Tao at: Cui.Tao@uth.tmc.edu
Dr. Vogler has a nursing background and has taught, held administrative positions and served as a school of nursing chief information officer and executive director of an information and educational technology center that provided information services and educational support. He has served on university level information, technology and educational committees, been involved at the university level for HIPPA, compliance, security, course management software and distance technology issues. He has participated in oversight of information technology, served on distance education committees and in university building programs. His recent research interests include blood pressure reactivity and un-witnessed patient falls. He has published journal articles, book chapters and has numerous presentations. His dissertation research focused on quality of care for terminally ill hospitalized patients.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Vogler at: Robert.W.Vogler@uth.tmc.edu
Hua Xu, PhD, is an associate professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics. He directs the Center for Computational Biomedicine at UTHealth. Currently, he is the Chair of American Medical Informatics Association natural language processing working group. In 2008, Xu received his Doctor of Philosophy in biomedical informatics from Columbia University. In addition, he holds a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Nanjing University in China and a Master of Science in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Xu is an expert in biomedical text processing and data mining. His primary research interests include: 1) natural language processing of clinical text; 2) text mining of biomedical literature; and 3) health care data mining. He is the author of many publications on biomedical NLP and text mining, and his research on medication extraction received the Homer Warner Award from AMIA in 2009. Xu has been principal investigator on a number of grants, including R01s from The National Library of Medicine and The National Cancer Institute.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Xu at: Hua.Xu@uth.tmc.edu
Jiajie Zhang, PhD, is the dean and Dr. Doris L. Ross Professor at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI). Zhang has spent the past two decades conducting research in biomedical informatics, cognitive science, human centered computing, decision making and information visualization. He has served as the principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on more than two dozen grants from diverse federal, state and private agencies. Most recently, Zhang has been the PI of a $15 million grant awarded to establish the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare (NCCD) under the aegis of the Office of the Nation Coordinator's Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects program for patient-centered cognitive support. As an educator, he has taught courses in human-computer interaction, EHR usability, information visualization and technology-mediated social dynamics. Zhang has supervised or co-supervised nearly twenty PhD students and seventy master’s students. During his tenure as the associate dean for research from 2002 to 2012, he helped the school rapidly increase its research funding and expenditures. Zhang has been instrumental in establishing several research centers at SBMI, including the aforementioned NCCD. In 2003, he was inducted as a fellow to the American College of Medical Informatics, and in 2002, he received the John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award as voted by SBMI students. Zhang has written in excess of 150 publications and presented at hundreds of organizations, academic institutions and conferences.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Zhang at: Jiajie.Zhang@uth.tmc.edu
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Zheng at: Wenjin.J.Zheng@uth.tmc.edu
Min Zhu, MD, PhD, MS is a 2010 doctoral graduate of the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) and currently on the faculty as an assistant professor and serves as the program manager of research. Zhu’s faculty appointment began on July 16, 2014. Prior to arriving in Houston in 2005 to begin his doctorate program at SBMI, Zhu worked in China as a Health IT software engineer and studied medical informatics at Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Because of his educational background in medicine, Zhu also interned at Zhongda Hospital at Southeast University in China, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. During his tenure at SBMI, Zhu has been a doctorate recipient, graduate research assistant, and research scientist.
Education
For more information, contact Dr. Zhu at: Min.Zhu@uth.tmc.edu