Company Website: https://www.imageassist.com/

Dr. Michael Golinko is in his fifth year at VUMC in the Department of Plastic Surgery. As the endowed Director of the Cleft & Craniofacial Program, he has built a comprehensive, multidisciplinary team that serves the entire Southeast region for children with facial differences. In his clinical practice, Dr. Golinko specializes in craniofacial and plastic surgery.

His research interests include studying neurodevelopment in children with craniosynostosis pre- and post-surgery, quality of life in pediatric craniofacial patients, and surgeon-parent consensus on post-craniosynostosis surgery head shape and the aesthetics of post-operative cleft lips. Dr. Golinko is passionate about craniofacial research, and as part of multiple national consortiums, his program receives NIH and Society funding to help advance the field.

Dr. Golinko also won the department teaching award in 2020 and is the founding program director of the Craniofacial Surgery Fellowship at VUMC.

Company Website: https://www.heartvue.ai/

Jeffrey Dendy, MD, is a cardiologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). His expertise is in non-invasive cardiovascular imaging, with a focus on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Following his clinical training, he served as the Director of Cardiovascular Imaging at PRISMA Health / University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville. In 2020, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Dendy's research focuses on cardiovascular MRI, including investigating the biophysical basis of blood oxygen-dependent signals in the myocardium. This work includes developing MRI pulse programming and programming MATLAB for analyzing and quantifying MRI data.

In addition, he leads projects investigating COVID-19-related myocardial injury using cMRI and is currently a co-investigator on an R01 project in which he utilizes cMRI to investigate subclinical myocardial disease in patients with atrial fibrillation.

In July of 2024, he founded Heartvue.AI, a cardiac imaging company that uses artificial intelligence to automate the workflow and data collection in cardiac imaging.

Company Website: https://www.empathbio.com/

Michael R. Savona, MD

Dr. Savona holds the Beverly and George Rawlings Directorship in Hematology Research and serves as Professor of Internal Medicine and Cancer Biology. He is a clinician-physician-scientist specializing in bone marrow malignancies and an international leader in the development of novel therapies for these patients. He has led the development and approval of several novel therapies, serving as the lead investigator for New Drug Applications (NDA) to the FDA. Dr. Savona founded the MDS/MPN International Working Group in 2012 and leads the first international platform study of novel therapies in MDS/MPN overlap syndromes: ABNLMARRO.

Dr. Savona’s interest in developing new therapies for hematologic malignancies and understanding how diseases arise and how best to prevent them from occurring led to key discoveries in mitochondrial metabolism in cancer cells. In collaboration with Vanderbilt medicinal chemists, he developed and licensed a series of early inhibitors of MCL1 to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals. His interest in how leukemia cells use energy differently than normal cells led to the functional development of a series of novel inhibitors of oxidative phosphorylation, currently in preclinical development with Empath Biosciences (www.empathbio.com), a company he co-founded in 2022 with natural product chemist Brian Bachmann. He has been involved in biomedical research for over 25 years and has published over 200 manuscripts. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Clinical Scholar.

Dr. Savona obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Davidson College and his medical degree from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He completed post-graduate clinical and research training at the University of California and the University of Michigan.

 Brian O. Bachmann, PhD

Brian O. Bachmann is the Stevenson Endowed Chair and Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt University Department of Chemistry. As principal investigator of the Vanderbilt Laboratory for Biosynthetic Studies, his research is concerned with the biosynthesis and discovery of natural and unnatural products, and their application to understanding and manipulating biological systems ranging from microbial ecologies to human biology.

Prior to Vanderbilt, Brian was Director of Chemistry at Ecopia Bioscience, where he helped build the first ‘genome mining’ program for natural product discovery. Brian completed his doctoral studies in Chemistry at The Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of Professor Craig A. Townsend, where he discovered and characterized beta-lactam synthetase, and his Master of Science at Southern Methodist University, working with Professor John D. Buynak on the chemical synthesis of mechanism-based inhibitors of beta-lactamase. Brian’s interest in biosynthesis was sparked by an impactful undergraduate research experience in the laboratory of Tomas Hudlicky on the biocatalytically enabled synthesis of inositols.

Company Website: https://www.brimanalytics.com/

Daniel Fabbri, PhD, FAMIA, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science. Dr. Fabbri is also the Director of Informatics Innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2014.

Dr. Fabbri’s research focuses on data management and machine learning applied to electronic medical records and clinical data. His early research developed privacy and security systems to identify inappropriate use of medical records, which was spun out into the company Maize Analytics, acquired in 2021 and again in 2022.

During his tenure at Vanderbilt, his research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense. His recent projects have provided operational support across Vanderbilt University Medical Center through the development of tools for patient engagement, efficient medical record chart review, and crowdsourcing services. Beyond research, Dr. Fabbri has taught the Big Data course and mentored undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students.

Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Sessions Introduction

Bio: Peter Embí, MD, MS, serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI), Professor of Medicine, and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).

As an internationally recognized researcher, educator and leader in the field of biomedical informatics, Dr. Embí is a frequently invited presenter and lecturer and has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed research articles, abstracts, books and book chapters. His areas of interest include clinical informatics, research informatics, public health informatics, and data-driven learning health systems. He had held research grants from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Library of Medicine, National Institute for Drug Abuse and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as well as numerous nonprofit foundations and public health agencies. 

He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his medical degree from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He completed residency, chief residency, an informatics fellowship and a Master of Science in Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University. He then completed his rheumatology and immunology fellowship training at the Cleveland Clinic before joining the faculty at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Prior to his move to VUMC, Dr. Embí served as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, Professor and Associate Dean for Informatics and Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Associate Director at Indiana CTSI and Vice President for Learning Health Systems at IU Health. Previous positions included leadership roles at The Ohio State University, where he was interim chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Associate Dean for Research Informatics for the College of Medicine and served as the nation’s first Chief Research Information Officer at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Prior to that, he served on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the UC Center for Health Informatics and director of Informatics for the Cincinnati Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Training. Dr. Embí also has experience in a variety of entrepreneurial activities, including co-inventing and co-founding health IT-based startups, partnering with companies to create and evaluate health care innovations, and developing programs that guide and enable other faculty to translate their discoveries into practice.

In recognition of his contributions to the field, Embí has been elected to Fellowship in the American College of Physicians (FACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI). He has also served in numerous national leadership roles, including as the immediate past president and chair of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association. He also has served on many national advisory boards, including service on the Board of Scientific Counselors to the National Library of Medicine and on the National Advisory Council for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).