Several members of our McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics Community have recently earned special recognition or contributed to the informatics community. We want to congratulate those individuals on these accomplishments.

• Assistant Professor Angela Ross, RN, DNP was named the new DHI Program Director effective Dec. 1.
• DHI Student Edith Ballard was recently selected as a member of the new TxHIMA Board of Directors. She will serve as Director of Education and Programs for 2024.
• Associate Professor Juliana Brixey, PhD earned a bronze-level “Excellence in Nursing Award” from the Good Samaritan Foundation earlier this month.

• Alan Pan, PhD student, was named the winner of the Paul C. Boyle Research award for fall 2023. His poster titled “Utilization of Pattern and Process Mining Techniques on Event Sequence Data to Enable Quality Improvement in Healthcare” won this month’s Poster Session.

The Student InterCouncil (SIC) is awarding $1,000 scholarships to eligible, current UTHealth Houston students. Visit the SIC scholarship opportunities webpage for more detailed information and to download application forms for each scholarship.

Applications must be submitted electronically no later than 11:59 PM CT on Sunday, Dec. 31. All applications must be submitted via Qualtrics. If you have questions, please contact Tanedra Booker in the Office of Academic Affairs and Student Success at Tanedra.Booker@uth.tmc.edu.

The McGovern Medical School Research Committee has launched a series of interdisciplinary professional development workshops designed to appeal to clinicians and basic scientists while promoting collaborative research interactions across the UTHealth Houston campus. On Jan. 17, 2024 the committee will discuss Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine and Healthcare via Teams. Dean Jiajie Zhang, PhD will chair this workshop from 9:00 to 11:50 AM.

Acknowledging a growing interest in and reliance on AI and ML, this collaborative workshop will feature faculty from McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, who are conducting cutting-edge research and applying the latest AI and ML tools and techniques in the service of UTHealth Houston and the broader scientific community. The workshop program will feature a brief overview of Medical AI and the McWilliams School, as well as presentations on large language model applications, learning health systems, imaging applications, and various other representative projects.

Note that registration is not required for this virtual event. The workshop schedule is listed below.

• Professor Dean Sittig, PhD talked to the Association of Health Care Journalists about how to spot and report on deepfakes.
• The $22 million gift given by D. Bradley McWilliams to support our school, which helped UTHealth Houston exceed its $500 million campaign goal, was included in Houston Business Journal's “Year In Review” series.