Zhiyu Wan, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt. His research interests include: optimizing privacy-preserving data sharing, with an emphasis on health and genomic data; leveraging game theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning techniques to improve social good; and analyzing social networks and network security. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University.

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I am a native to California. I attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California for my undergraduate studies and majored in biology and chemistry. I attended medical school at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Throughout my medical education, I did research on underserved populations with work published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine on the impact of funding instability on the teaching health center graduate medical education program. During my psychiatry rotations, I discovered my fascination with the human mind, the rewards of aiding patients in their recovery from mental illness, and an appreciation for the legal side of psychiatry. For these reasons, I am now pursuing a psychiatry residency at University of California, Riverside.

As a psychiatrist, I have been privy to many of the ways psychiatry has fallen behind other areas of medicine. One of these areas is the lack of utilization of information technology within healthcare. I desire to be part of the groundbreaking ways that psychiatry utilizes information and data from providers, thus improving healthcare for the mentally ill. Whether this is by incorporating electronic medical records within a hospital system or through the use of AI to improve outcomes, I have learned clinical informatics can be used as a catalyst between data and optimizing clinical care for those who suffer from severe mental illness. I foresee clinical informatics becoming a vital aspect of every care delivery team. As clinical informatics continues to be ingrained within medical systems and healthcare delivery, I’m excited to be a part of this transition and relish the career opportunities a master's degree in clinical informatics can provide.