Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I started out as a Health Systems Software engineer at Vanderbilt Medical Center when Health IT was just a startup in the basement of the Eskind Biomedical Library. After working in the Bay Area for years, I gave myself 6-months tops that I wouldn’t survive working in the hospital basement. Then, almost 20 years later, I look back and realize that my interests in technologies and healthcare grew as fast as my kids!

I have a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from India, and I received my MBA degree from TSU. Over the years at Vanderbilt, I have been involved in many projects as a developer and as a manager. I find a natural convergence of health care and information technology, and managing it is both interesting and challenging. My past project working on computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) exemplifies just that, we were tasked to deliver value-based care using advanced technologies, securely exchanging sensitive patient data, and even showcasing a touch of artificial intelligence.

In the near future I look forward to working with digitized healthcare data to help find systemic waste, identify people at risk of chronic diseases, utilize technologies like cloud computing, AI, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to streamline health care delivery, and align it with changing consumer preferences, and to do so fast (and furiously)!  I would love to do a project analyzing the rising costs of healthcare and finding ways to tame it. A task that is complicated, but not impossible. 

I love hiking, skiing, traveling, losing debates to my kids, serving at the pleasure of my wife, and joking.

https://pediatrics.vumc.org/person/stephen-c-gradwohl

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I completed my undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. I continued on at Washington University in the School of Medicine, where I obtained my Medical Doctorate and a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation. I completed my Pediatric Residency at St. Louis Children’s hospital and recently completed my fellowship training in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital Colorado. I am excited to be joining the faculty at Vanderbilt in the Department of Pediatrics and the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine this summer.

My passion for clinical informatics has grown over the years through my research experiences with modeling large patient databases, optimizing information retrieval in the EHR, evaluating diagnostic errors, and user-centered design related to antimicrobial stewardship. I am most excited about learning best practices to develop clinical decision support tools to improve quality of care, efficiency, and satisfaction in the busy environment of the emergency room. I have pursued further training in Design Thinking and Machine Learning recently through online courses to support this goal.

When I have needed a break during the past decade and a half of education and training, I am usually traveling. My wife Amanda and our four year old daughter Mila are always down for a hike or exploring somewhere new. When I am in town, I always enjoy meeting up to brainstorm ideas over coffee or a beer.

https://www.spartanburgregional.com/find-a-doctor/geevan-george

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and about 15 years ago I moved Greenville, South Carolina where I call the Upstate home. I went to undergrad at Bob Jones University and medical school at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville.  I will be finishing my family medicine residency in June at Prisma Health and subsequently working as an outpatient position with Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System. The work I am able to do in caring for my patients has fueled my interest within clinical informatics, to improve the technology physicians and patients interact with when it comes to providing health care.

Growing up and working in the upstate of South Carolina lends itself to a variety of outdoor activities. If I am not caring for patients, you will usually find me hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, kayaking, trail running or gardening. I enjoy deep sea fishing with my siblings and spending time with my church family.  I also travel overseas for medical mission trips where I have the opportunity to treat patients and teach medical students.

During my training as a medical student and resident, I realized how much time I spent in front of a computer documenting and searching information in the electronic medical record to care for my patients. I also realized that many physicians have become weary and burnout due to the time spent with the EMR; and this is where my interests lie. I want to learn tools to improve the physician experience with the EMR and leverage the technology to better care for my patient population. I also have interests with improving clinical workflow to enrich the physician and patient interaction and ultimately increase revenue. I look forward to learning about different tools that my colleagues have used within their clinical enterprises and share ideas on how to improve the clinical experience.

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I grew up in Chappaqua, New York, where not much happens. To pass the time I took a computer science class in high school and fell in love with it. My passion for programming brought me to Brown University where I was poised to be a software engineer. That is, until a fateful internship showed me the horrors of pure cubicle work day in and day out. I realized I wanted to work with people, so I completed a degree in Computational Biology. This brought me to Stony Brook School of Medicine.  At Stony Brook my initial passion came through again, as I made an iPhone app for a Urologist and also created a sorting program to assign my fellow students into their preferred rotations.

I completed Internal Medicine Residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2019 and started work as a Hospitalist at Vanderbilt that year. I rediscovered my passion for programming and algorithms and took the role of Epic Clinician Champion for the Hospitalist Department. Multiple committees and several Grand Rounds presentations later I found that I would need a deeper understanding to make true change. I completed the basic and advanced builder courses at Epic and am now completing the MSACI program to further help my institution and department.

https://drjohannbrandes.wordpress.com/about/

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

Keeping patients free from complications and out of the hospital has always been a sign of good and proactive medicine, but in times of COVID and strained budgets this takes on an ever greater importance both in terms of patient safety and stewardship of resources. As an oncologist at TN Oncology my patients are often particularly vulnerable and I believe that integration and analysis of the wealth of data generated on a daily basis will allow me to develop clinical decision support systems to identify those at highest risk for complications, tailor treatments based on clinical and genetic/genomic characteristics and potentially de-escalate treatment intensity where appropriate.

Prior to coming to TN Oncology, I completed residency and fellowship training in Oncology and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins and held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins and Emory University. My research focused on the identification of epigenetic mechanisms in lung carcinogenesis and resistance to treatment and I used large scale analysis of data form the Department of Veterans affairs to validate hypotheses generated in the laboratory.  Specifically, we studied cancer risk after exposure to several potentially preventative treatment interventions.

Personally, I enjoy running, mountain biking and music. Recently, my eleven year old son has started challenging me in complicated strategy games. 

Fall 2020-Spring 2022

I am an Associate Professor in Radiation Oncology at Washington University in St. Louis. I graduated from Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2011 and completed residency in radiation oncology at Washington University in St. Louis in 2016. My areas of practice and academic research are in primary and secondary CNS malignancies.

While I have some practical experience with informatics, I am interested in furthering my conceptual understanding.  Prior to enrolling in the MSACI programing, I have been working to improve my baseline knowledge of Epic EMR having completed power user and physician builder training courses.  Ideally, I would like to apply new knowledge and experience to improve my patient outcomes and Radiation Oncology as whole.  However, I am interested to see informatics initiatives at the hospital or hospital system wide level. 

Outside of work I am a father to two daughters, Pea and Rosie.   My wife and I enjoy spending time outdoors, time with the family, and traveling.  I enjoy learning more about computer science in my free time by working on my home server and trying to learn how to code. 

Minoo Bagheri, PhD, MSc, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics with a secondary appointment in Division of Cardiovascular Medicine within the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her background is in nutritional epidemiology and big data analysis, and during her graduate studies at Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Harvard School of Public Health, she gained extensive experience in identification of metabolomic biomarkers of diet and disease and a strong background in high-throughput multi-omics techniques and big data analysis.

I am interested in using polygenic methods to improve clinical classification and treatment strategies. For example, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and many other common diseases, is influenced by polygenic risk, which is the cumulative, small effects of many common gene variants. A number of studies have also suggested that variability in polygenic disease risk also affects variability in response to drug therapy for common disease.

Polygenic risk can be quantified for an individual using polygenic risk scores (PRS). Recent studies in coronary artery disease and drug-induced long QT syndrome have shown the PRS developed for a disease or phenotype are also able to predict response to drugs in treatment of that disease. We plan to apply that idea to treatment of type 2 diabetes. If there is an interaction between polygenic risk and treatment response, this may identify patients who will benefit more or less from specific treatments, and inform clinical practice.  

Uday Suresh, MS, is a PhD candidate advised by Jessica Ancker, PhD, MPH. He received a BS in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Uday received an MS in Biomedical Informatics from Vanderbilt. Before graduate school, he worked in healthcare technology startups.

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https://udaysuresh.com/