In small, in-person classes, you’ll learn from renowned faculty and experts whose backgrounds in health, research, and technology allow you to develop the in-depth skill-set necessary for success in biomedical informatics.
Michael Baltasi, PhD
Michael Baltasi, PhD, has held leadership positions in corporate IT and university administration for 10+ years. He currently serves as Deputy Director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago. In this role, Michael oversees financial planning, marketing, and the project portfolio for the organization, and serves as a key decision-maker in technical investments and industry partnerships. His teaching interests probe the intersection between data science and the conceptually-rich fields of managerial science and leadership theory.
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Prashila Dullabh, MD
Prashila Dullabh, MD, is a Senior Fellow and Program Area Director in health informatics at NORC at the University of Chicago. Dr. Dullabh is a clinician informatician with more than 15 years of experience in informatics, health care and health services research.
Dr. Dullabh has a specific interest in health information exchange (HIE), consumer e-Health, clinical decision support and patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and is particularly interested in the intersection of health informatics and policy. In her work as Senior fellow, she directs large evaluation, technical assistance and strategic projects for federal funders and foundations. Her project work has involved identifying gap areas and strategic investment opportunities for PCOR data infrastructure for the Department of Health and Human Services and research topic prioritization for the Patient-centered Outcomes Research Institute. She has also directed large program evaluations on HIE and health IT adoption and use.
Read about Dr. Dullabh's discussion on the Role of Health Information Technology in Clinical Decision Support.
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Jason Edelstein, MS
An information security professional with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and a masters in Computer Science, both from the University of Chicago, Jason Edelstein’s experience covers everything from securing email gateways to academic systems management to teaching and mentoring. Currently IT Risk and Compliance Program Manager at the University of Chicago.
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Larry Helseth, PhD
Larry Helseth, PhD, is a Translational Bioinformatician at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois. He was trained as a biochemist, has both wet lab and dry lab experience and has worked in both academics and the healthcare industry. His current role is developing software to analyze genomic data for integration into the patient’s medical record. Recent projects included helping to implement pharmacogenomics screening at NorthShore, developing software to help pathologists interpret cancer panel results and building a variant repository to manage genomic data. His research interests include integrating multiple ‘omics and using mass spectrometry to study protein structure and function.
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Jane Holl, MD MPH
Jane Holl, MD MPH is a pediatrician and fellowship-trained health services and outcomes researcher. She led the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research and the Center for Education in Health Sciences at Northwestern University for 10+ years, prior to her recent move to the University of Chicago. Her academic activities focus on patient safety, quality of care, healthcare delivery, and applied implementation research, as well as, the creation of novel graduate education programs.
She is currently engaged in extramurally-funded research projects focused on the redesign of delivery of stroke care (E-SPEED), diagnostic error in stroke (THESIS), enhanced recovery in children after surgery (ENRICH-US), and self-care of newly diagnosed diabetes patients (DIY-DM). She co-teaches a new course, Topics in Healthcare Delivery Science.
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Cheng-Kai Kao, MD
Cheng-Kai Kao, MD, is an assistant professor and academic hospitalist in the department of medicine where he is the medical director of informatics, chair of the clinical process review committee, and medical director of international patient services. He is board certified in clinical informatics and his areas of interests include mobile health, clinical decision support, population health and international patient care. In his role as medical director of informatics, his work focuses on leveraging mobile technology to enhance clinical workflow, developing clinical decision support tools, and making innovations to improve care quality and patient experience.
Read about Dr. Kao's Push to Develop Healthcare Informatics Through Entrepreneurship and Innovation and see what he's doing to help realize the potential of technology in healthcare.
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Imran Khan, MBA, MS
Imran Khan currently serves as the Director of Clinical Research Strategic Initiatives at AbbVie, where he is responsible for strategic planning and execution of enterprise capabilities for the Drug Development Organization. Previously, Imran served on the Senior Management team at AbbVie for launching new drugs and strategic technology capabilities in the Virology, Oncology, and Neuroscience therapeutic areas. He has a successful track record of developing innovative technology solutions to enable healthcare providers and patients to manage advanced medication therapies for some of the world’s most complex diseases. Prior to joining biopharma, Imran worked for Advocate Health Care, a large Integrated Delivery Network health system in the state of Illinois, where he led Electronic Health Records implementations, Health Information Exchanges, Patient Portals, several Interoperability projects, clinical quality improvement initiatives such as Clinical Integration, Meaningful Use, PQRS, Accountable Care Organizations, and Patient-Centered Medical Home for the largest community of hospital-affiliated physicians in the United States. In other roles, Imran worked for GE Healthcare and Walgreens, where he developed and supported several clinical and pharmaceutical applications. Imran earned his BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, MS in Medical Informatics from Northwestern University, and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics:
- MSBI 39901: Capstone Proposal
Anoop Mayampurath, PhD
Anoop Mayampurath, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist at the Computation Institute and a Senior Statistician at the Center for Research Informatics, as well as an instructor for the MSCP program at The University of Chicago. His research interests lie in the application of statistical and machine learning algorithms for life science and medical studies. His work currently focuses on statistical modeling and analytics-research for clinical data towards improving patient outcome and hospital care.
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Melvin Munsaka PhD, MSc, MEd
Melvin S. Munsaka is a Senior Director and Head of the Safety Statistics Group at AbbVie in the Statistical Sciences Department. He has a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Queen’s University in Canada and an MSc in Mathematical Statistics and MEd in Mathematics from McGill University in Canada. Melvin has been in the pharmaceutical industry for more than 20 years. He co-leads some initiatives of the Drug Information Association Bayesian Scientific Working Group Safety Subteam and some initiatives of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section Safety Working Group. He is also the Publicity Chair of the Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop and has held positions of President, Program Chair, and Chapter Representative of the Northeast Illinois Chapter of the ASA and is Past Chair of the ASA Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts and member at-large of the Executive Committee of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section. Melvin is also the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Public Schools Science Fair, Inc. He continues to pursue research in his areas of interest in statistics and computing and to explore ideas related to ML, AI, and NLP especially as they apply to dug safety. He is regularly involved in professional meetings and has contributed to conference presentations, book chapters and journal articles and peer reviews journal articles.
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Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics:
- Introduction to Biostatistics Prerequisite
Valerie Press, MD, MPH
Valerie Press is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and is the Executive Medical Director of Specialty Value Based Care at the University of Chicago. She received her undergraduate, medical, and public health degrees from the University of Michigan before completing her Internal Medicine-Pediatrics combined residency training at the University of Chicago. After residency she completed a Hospitalist Scholars Health Services Research Fellowship. Since Fellowship she has completed both an internal KM1 and an NIH K23 career development award and is currently funded by an NIH R03 grant.
Dr. Press’ research primarily focuses the use of implementation science methods to develop and evaluate interventions and their delivery to improve patient-centered care for underserved patients with chronic lung disease and limited health literacy through novel interventions in the hospital setting targeted at patients, clinicians, and systems. She has published dozens of papers related to her research and has received awards for this work including the Junior Investigator Award from the Society of Hospital Medicine in 2017 and the Early Career Achievement Award from the American Thoracic Society in 2019. She had mentored over two dozen undergraduate and medical students and was awarded the John D. Arnold Mentor Award from the Pritzker School of Medicine this past spring.
In addition to her research and education roles, she Co-Directs the COPD Value Based Care Program and supports other specialty value based care programs through her role as Medical Director with the Center for Care Transformation. She is co-instructor, along with Jane Holl of the inaugural Topics in Healthcare Delivery Science course through the Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics program.
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Krishna G. Ramachandran, MBA, MS
Krishna has been a leader in health care for more than 15 years. He currently serves as a Vice President at Blue Cross Blue Shield, responsible for developing and executing their health data exchange strategy with providers and external partners across five states. Before joining BCBS in November 2017, he served as Chief Administrative Officer of DuPage Medical Group and its subsidiary Boncura Health Solutions. Other roles at DuPage included Chief Information and Transformation Officer. Prior to DuPage, he held leadership roles at Epic Systems Corporation. Krishna teaches in The University of Chicago’s Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics program and is actively involved in healthcare associations and local nonprofits. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (India); a Master of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago; and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
His interests include data analytics, change management, health information technology, innovation, population health, and process improvement.
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Nicholas Soulakis, PhD
A population health scientist and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Nicholas Soulakis’ research focus lies at the intersection of epidemiology and informatics with an emphasis on understanding the data-rich environment created by health information technology. By leveraging computationally intensive analytical techniques to monitor healthcare quality, his current work seeks to develop a more comprehensive scientific approach to understanding the dynamics of care coordination for hospitalized patient populations.
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Michael Stiehl, MS
Michael Stiehl, MS, is a Senior Policy Analyst with Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. With over fifteen years of experience in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis he brings an extensive understanding of how to successfully incorporate GIS into sound project planning, strategy development and the use of metrics to guide implementation and evaluation. Mr. Stiehl’s areas of interest include public policy, with a focus on child welfare, community development, education and human services, data analysis, data visualization, strategic planning and policy development. Currently his work focuses on understanding complex human service delivery systems, administrative data and the role of state agencies and community based organizations in improving outcomes for vulnerable populations.
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Samuel Volchenboum, MD, PhD, MS
Faculty Director, MScBMI
Dr. Volchenboum is an associate professor of pediatrics and the associate chief research informatics officer for the biological sciences division at the University of Chicago. He is the Dean of Masters Programs and directs a program in health sciences informatics for the division. His clinical specialty is pediatric hematology / oncology, caring for kids with cancer and diseases of the blood. In addition to his clinical practice, he directs the University of Chicago’s Pediatric Cancer Data Commons, a research group dedicated to liberating and democratizing data for pediatric malignancies.
Until 2019, Dr. Volchenboum directed the Center for Research Informatics, a 40-person group that supports biological research throughout the division. As director of this center, he oversaw high-performance computing, HIPAA-compliant storage and backup, application development to support clinical trials, development and maintenance of the clinical trials management system, the clinical research data warehouse, data analytics and visualization, and bioinformatics, including high-throughput genomic analyses and machine learning. He participates in and leads various data governance initiatives throughout the University and medical center. He is the director of the Informatics Core for the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Since 2015, he has been the faculty director for the Masters in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Chicago.
Read about Dr. Volchenboum's Lecture on the Use of Clinical Informatics and Big Data for Hospital Safety.
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Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics:
- MSBI 31500: Ethics and Policy Questions: Genomics, Health Care, and Big Data
- Overview of Clinical Care Systems Prerequisite