Assistant Professor
Department of Clinical and Health Informatics
Contact
[email protected] | 713-500-3946
"Dr. Smith holds a Ph.D. in Health Informatics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston's School of Biomedical Informatics. Her undergraduate degree is in microbiology from Eastern Kentucky University, and she is also a medical technologist (medical laboratory scientist). Before entering graduate school, she worked in clinical laboratories at MD Anderson Cancer Center (both medical and veterinary) and at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. She then implemented St. Luke’s first laboratory information system in 1989. After that project went live, she went to work for the vendor, and over the next decade, worked for five different vendors, implementing and supporting clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology systems for over fifty hospitals. One of these companies was ADAC HealthCare Information Systems (a subsidiary of ADAC Laboratories), where she was part of the effort that led to the company earning the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 1996. In 2000, she returned to MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she was project manager and lead technical contact for the anatomic pathology system replacement project in 2000-2002.
She entered the School of Health Information Sciences (now McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics) in 2002, and earned her MS in 2005 and her PhD in 2010. Her dissertation work focused on the effect of proximity, explicitness, and representation of basic science information on student clinical problem solving. She then joined The University of Texas at Austin’s Health IT professional education certificate program, where she taught, advised, and mentored over 550 students. She returned to SBMI in 2014, and now teaches in the Applied track. She completed the Health Educators Fellowship Program at the McGovern Medical School, has twice earned the prestigious John P. McGovern Outstanding Teacher Award, and has been awarded the Dean’s Excellence Award for Teaching. Her courses include BMI5300 Introduction to Biomedical Informatics and BMI5371 Business and Technical Communication.