Jacob Lynn, PhD, is a VGM postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics with Dr. Wei-Qi Wei as his mentor. He received his PhD from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in 2024, where his retinal organoid model demonstrated successful rescue of a CRISPRcorrected pathogenic variant in the gene PRPH2. While at the Dean McGee Eye Institute, he trained as a clinical study coordinator for the NAC Attack trial and founded the Oklahoma Chapter of Foundation Fighting Blindness, serving as President.

Alexandra “Allie” Williams, MD, is a VGM postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pediatric Cardiology with Dr. Prince Kannankeril as her mentor. Allie’s research focus is on investigating cardiac genetics underlying sudden unexplained infant death. Specifically, Allie is interested in analyzing large genetic databases and data sets to evaluate how genetic variation impacts disease presentation, outcomes and treatment response in our pediatric cardiology patients.

Dr. Brian Tran is originally from Georgia and studied Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. After graduation, he worked at Epic as a Technical Services Analyst for several years, which is where most of his clinical informatics experience originated. His main work at Epic was focused in radiology, imaging decision support and PACS integrations. He regularly worked with several different health care systems to maintain, troubleshoot and implement new features for their radiology systems.

After his time at Epic, he received his MD at Wake Forest and finished his anesthesiology residency at University of Miami in 2025. Dr. Tran is currently an anesthesiologist just south of Seattle. He has general interest in AI and its potential in health care. From the program and colleagues, he is looking forward to learning more about the management perspective of implementing clinical informatics related projects in a health care system.

Dr. Austin Griffin is a third-year cardiology fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He grew up in Ohio and completed both his Internal Medicine residency and chief year at the Cleveland Clinic before moving to Nashville for cardiology fellowship training. His path in medicine has been shaped by a deep commitment to patient care, curiosity about systems-level improvement, and the desire to make health care more effective and humane. Before medical school, his work in global health policy and pharmaceutical operations shaped his drive to improve health care organization and delivery. During residency, he partnered with the informatics department and led efforts to streamline cardiology discharge workflows. These experiences helped him discover that informatics was a powerful bridge between clinical insight and health care systems improvement at scale.

Looking forward, Dr. Griffin is excited to collaborate with colleagues who are passionate about using data science and AI to solve clinical problems. In particular, he is eager to learn more about natural language processing, predictive analytics and multimodal data integration to ethically improve documentation, consult triage and arrhythmia risk prediction in patients with heritable cardiomyopathies. He is an affable team player who's thrilled to join this program and hopes his unique perspective will add great variety to the group's discourse. (Joined Fall 2025)