Dr. James Cimino became the inaugural director of the Informatics Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2015 and then inaugural chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science in 2024. Prior to UAB, he was on faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Columbia University for 20 years, followed by 7 years as Director of the Laboratory for Informatics Development at the NIH Clinical Center and the National Library of Medicine. He is Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Physicians, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and winner of the American Medical Informatics Association’s Morris F. Collen Award for Excellence. He was appointed Adjoint Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on November 1, 2023. 

Research interests: Medical concept representation, controlled vocabulary, biomedical informatics, medical decision making
UAB Email: jamescimino@uabmc.edu

Dr. Tkaczyk is a graduate of the MD/PhD program at the University of Michigan. He has a PhD in electrical engineering under the pedigree of Nobel Laureate Gerard Mourou. Dr. Tkaczyk's post-doctoral training in medical device design at the University of Tartu Institute of Physics was supported by the Fullbright and Whitaker awards. He is active in the leadership of several conferences and international working groups related to artificial intelligence and dermatologic imaging technologies. 

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Jessica Buckner is a Nurse Informatics Data Analyst with 10 years of nursing experience in various clinical settings. She began her nursing career in 2012 working in Long Term Care/Skilled Nursing, and in 2016 transitioned to Operating Room nursing becoming a team leader. Since 2019, Jessica has worked as a Utilization Review nurse, initially for an insurance payor conducting chart reviews for medical necessity of inpatient hospital admission. She became a travel Utilization Review nurse in 2021 and assisted various hospitals with chart review, payor communication, workflow creation, and EHR implementation. She obtained her PN from Tennessee College of Applied Technology, her BSN from University of Tennessee at Martin, and is currently pursuing her MSN degree in Nursing Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. She received her Doctor of Nursing Practice and Post-Masters Certificate in Nursing Education in December 2024.

Michael is a clinical informatics nurse with over ten years of informatics experience in roles ranging from analyst to product manager.  His prior focus has been in translational informatics where he has created clinical decision support tools for clinicians at VUMC. Currently, he is tasked with improving usability of VA data for research and supporting DBMI research projects.

Susannah Rose, MSSW, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and is Core Faculty in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Vanderbilt University (VU). She is also Executive Director of the AI Discovery and Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation and Clinical Excellence (ADVANCE) Center. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Health Policy and is a Faculty Scholar in the Center for Health Services Research. Prior to VUMC/VU, she was a Full Professional Staff (faculty) member at Cleveland Clinic, and she served in many leadership roles, including as the Director of Research for the Center of Bioethics, the Director of Research for Safety, Quality and Patient Experience, and the Associate Chief Experience Officer. She was also an Assistant Professor at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine and in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Rose is also an Instructor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she teaches public health ethics, including artificial intelligence ethics.

Dr. Rose earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University's Health Policy Program (with a concentration in Ethics) in 2010. Dr. Rose was a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pre-doctoral research fellow; a Harvard Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Graduate Fellow; a Safra post-doctoral lab fellow; and she was also a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) through the Program in Cancer Research Outcomes Training (PCORT). Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned an MS in Bioethics from Union College/Albany Medical Center in 2006, and a MS in Social Work from Columbia University in 1998. Dr. Rose was a clinical social worker and researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

During her career, Dr. Rose has received multiple mentorship and teaching awards. She has published two books focused on helping patients and family members cope with cancer, and she has published and presented in academic venues on topics related to technology diffusion in healthcare, conflicts of interest in medicine, health policy ethics, and bioethics. Her publications have appeared in high-ranked peer-reviewed journals, such as: JAMA Internal Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM), The Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), PLOS One, American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), and The Hastings Center Report, and her book chapters on health policy ethics and end of life care have been published by the Oxford University Press. She frequently presents at peer-reviewed national and international conferences, and is invited to speak at conferences all over the world, including the United States, Sweden, Germany and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Her current research focuses upon the ethics and impact of medical technology innovations, including artificial intelligence in healthcare, improving patient experience, and developing data-driven approaches to improve patient care. Dr. Rose’s research has been generously funded by multiple funding sources, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, NIH’s Clinical & Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) at Cleveland Clinic & Case Western Reserve University, and The Greenwall Foundation, in addition to internal Cleveland Clinic funding sources.