Katie Brown, PhD
Dr. Katherine Brown is an Instructor in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tennessee Technological University, where her dissertation focused on evaluating, explaining, and leveraging uncertainty in machine learning models. She completed a National Library of Medicine T15 Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at VUMC from August 2023 to August 2026 during which she combined studied generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) for clinical prediction, human-AI collaboration, and the impact of clinical AI in rural settings. She was mentored by Drs. Brad Malin, Jessica Ancker, and Sharon Davis during her postdoctoral training.
Dr. Brown is growing in national recognition for her research on improving AI performance and reliability in rural and underserved healthcare settings. She received the Tennessee Center for AIDS Research (TN-CFAR) early career development award to develop generative AI tools to help frontline health workers in rural Kenya receive broader access to specialist-level consultation advice (Mentored by Drs. Brad Malin and. Martin Were). She also has a growing body of work in adapting state-of-the-art technologies in generative AI and machine learning to advance the performance of clinical AI in the rural US (Mentored by Drs. Sharon Davis and Brad Malin).
Her research contributions have been recognized with the 2025 Society of Critical Care Medicine Star Research Award, the 2020 Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Best Student Paper Award, and the 2019 ACM Southeast Conference Runner-up Best Paper Award. She is an invited speaker on trustworthy AI, rural healthcare innovation, and LLM models in medicine. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) after her PhD-era appointment on JAMIA’s Student Editorial Board. She also recently appeared on AMIA Unpacked to discuss her research and upcoming presentations at the 2026 AMIA Annual Symposium (https://amia.org/news-publications/podcasts/amia-unpacked-podcast/episo…)
Katie is always open to new collaborations to bring high-performing AI to all populations.