Kimberly Garcia Flores is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2024 where she earned her bachelor's degree in communication of science and technology and American Studies. Much of her undergraduate research traversed clinical ethics, technology, communications, and health policy. Working under Elise Russo and Adam Wright, Kimberly supports the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center as a Research Analyst. 

Parker Christy worked in the Alvin Jeffery lab for nearly two years at the Vanderbilt School of Nursing and has a customer service/tech support background. He joined DBMI in July 2024 as Associate Application Developer and is currently working closely with Alvin Jeffery to identify which phenotypes are at risk for or affected by substance use disorders and addiction leveraging natural language processing on clinical notes.

Emma DaSilva joined DBMI in July 2024. She received a bachelor's degree in public service and public policy from Arizona State University in 2021. And a bachelor's degree in healthcare administration from Sacred Heart University in 2022. After graduating, she took a position working at Nuvance Health in Connecticut, gaining experience in both the revenue cycle and finance departments. While working she earned her master's in healthcare administration from Tulane University. 

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I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology. In 2021, I joined VUMC as part of the All of Us research program, where I contributed to groundbreaking efforts in personalized medicine and health data collection. Transitioning to the Department of Biomedical Informatics in 2024.

Dr. Katherine Musacchio Schafer is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. She is a clinical psychologist with expertise in the intersection of suicide prevention and informatics. She recently completed a two-year fellowship to equip her with strong training in healthcare quality improvement as well as translational and implementation sciences. She has published over 30 articles investigating risk factors for and treatment of suicidal ideation. Further, she has experience in the development of iOS applications, ambulatory treatments, and randomized control trials. She will be funded during her first two years under the P30 Rapid Learning Health Systems Grant during which time she will focus on qualitative research and application building in the development and evaluation of clinical decision support tools. 

Recent extramural funding includes a prestigious Child Intervention, Prevention, and Services fellowship through the National Institutes of Health as well as three dissertation awards from the Association of Behavior and Cognitive Therapies (Virginia Roswell Student Dissertation Award), Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, and the Military and Suicide Research Consortium Dissertation Award. Further, she received awards for her mentorship and teaching contributions from Florida State University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

Dr. Schafer has delivered invited talks at medical schools and conferences presentations at local, national, and international conferences. Her work received awards including Association of Behavior and Cognitive Therapies Veteran and Military Special Interest Group Student Poster Award and the Association of Behavior and Cognitive Therapies Suicide Self-Injury Special Interest Group Student Poster Award.

Clinically she specializes in the evidence based treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, primarily using Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure Therapy. She has received national accolades for her clinical work, with support coming from Military and Suicide Research Consortium Training Program and Beck Institute Soldier Suicide Prevention Scholarship Award.

Research interests: clinical decision support tools, implementation science, translational science, suicide prevention

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