pSCANNER Team

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine and founding chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics at UCSD. She is the Principal Investigator of pSCANNER and has experience leading multidisciplinary projects at the intersections of biomedicine and quantitative sciences.  She will also be the site PI for the University of California San Diego. Her focus for pSCANNER will involve coordinating all of the teams and communication with PCORI and the coordinating center. Her research focus is construction and evaluation of novel data mining and decision support tools for biomedical research and clinical care, with particular emphasis on prognostication, as well as privacy technology tools to enable data sharing.

Jane Burns, MD, Professor of Medicine. Dr. Burns is the Director of the Kawasaki Disease Research Center at UCSD and will be creating a Kawasaki Disease data warehouse to facilitate research across the University of California campuses. She will also be recruiting participants for the focus groups. Her research background includes 30 years of Kawasaki Disease pathogenesis, epidemiology, genetics, and treatment.

Cole Davisson, Chief Technology Officer. He is leading the deployment of privacy-preserving technologies and distributed data and processing mechanisms used in pSCANNER.

Michele Day, PhD, Program Manager. Dr. Day has extensive experience in applied research, data analysis and technical writing. She is the program manager for the pSCANNER project.

Emily Guardado, BA, Staff Research Associate. She is the Project Coordinator for pSCANNER. 

Chun-Nan Hsu, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine. Dr. Hsu has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed research articles in the fields of machine learning, data mining, and biomedical informatics. His team developed widely used software tools for biomedical sciences. He won the IBM Faculty Award for his distinguished contributions to biomedical text mining in 2012.

Jejo Koola, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor. Dr. Koola's research interests include building predictive models and information visualization techniques to inform healthcare decision making at the point of care. He serves as a subject matter expert in the goals of data harmonization, extraction, and modeling for pSCANNER. 

Paulina Paul, MS, Software Developer. Paulina is a Data Analyst for pSCANNER at UCSD.

Kai W. Post, MS, Bioinformatics Programmer. Kai is a programmer for pSCANNER at UCSD.

Siddharth Singh, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, with an interest in inflammatory bowel diseases. His research is focused on comparative effectiveness and safety of pharmacological therapies and management strategies for IBD, and he's developing an EMR-based cohort of patients with IBD across all UCs to perform these studies. He's also collaborating with other CDRNs and PPRNs related to immune-mediated diseases to develop a patient-centered approach to comparative effectiveness research, and is the pSCANNER representative for the newly formed Autoimmune and Systemic Inflammatory Syndromes Collaborative Research Group (ASIS CRG) of PCORNet.

Carl Stepnowsky, PhD is a Research Health Scientist at the VA San Diego Healthcare System, an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at UCSD, and the Chief Science Officer for the American Sleep Apnea Association. His focus of research is on developing programs to increase adherence with therapy for sleep apnea. Several of Dr. Stepnowsky’s current efforts are now focused on applying research results.

Howard Taras, MD, Director of Community Engagement for UCSD’s CTSA and Professor of Pediatrics. Dr. Taras has extensive experience in bridging community-based organizations with academics and directly engage communities in the pSCANNER stakeholder panel.

Tsung-Ting Kuo, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar. Dr. Kuo's research interests include Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Mining. His work with pSCANNER will consist of extracting data elements from narrative clinical notes, constructing secured/shared NLP platform, devising specialized NLP tools, and developing/validating/deploying NLP phenotypes.

Hai Yang, MS, Senior Statistician of Biomedical Informatics in the UCSD School of Medicine. His research interests include healthcare data analysis, statistical consulting and genomics. He is a Data Analyst for pSCANNER at UCSD. 

Scott Duvall, PhD is the Acting Director of the VA Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI), a national Department of Veterans Affairs resource center serving more than 5,000 users. He is responsible for overseeing the harmonization and implementation of data resources and analysis tools. Included in this work is transforming and mapping patient records, collecting and standardizing genetic test results, extracting clinical, social, and demographic elements from text using natural language processing, and developing tools to explore and visualize data. Dr. DuVall holds an academic appointments in the University of Utah School of Medicine and College of Pharmacy.

Michael Matheny, MS, MPH, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Matheny is the site PI for the Tennessee Valley VA Health System. This site is primarily responsible for participating in the national VA OMOP transformation, development of new automated observational cohort analytic tools, and coordinating the CHF use case data elements and data quality assessment for the VA. His research interests include risk prediction modeling and validation as well as machine learning techniques and biostatistics and informatics research of post-marking surveillance among cardiac devices and nephrotoxic medications.

Mike Hogarth, MD, Vice Chair of Information Services Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Internal Medicine, University of California Davis. Dr. Hogarth will serve as the site PI for University of California Davis. His role in the pSCANNER project will be to develop and deploy sophisticated health informatics systems in support of clinical research. His research background includes health informatics and particular experience in electronic data capture, as well as integration with institutional electronic health record systems.

Katherine Kim, MPH, MBA, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of California Davis. Dr. Kim has extensive experience with healthcare software and information technology used to address health disparities. For the pSCANNER project, she will bring skills in consumer health application and intervention design as well as understanding of the privacy and security challenges in conducting research using mobile and Internet technologies.

Kai Zheng, PhD, is the site PI for the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He is Associate Professor of Informatics in the Department of Informatics at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He is also Co-Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the UCI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. Zheng’s research draws upon techniques from the fields of information systems research and human–computer interaction to study the use of information, communication, and decision technologies in patient care delivery and management. His recent work has focused on topics related to interaction design, workflow and sociotechnical integration, and diffusion and evaluation of health information technologies.

Lisa Dahm, PhD, Director of Clinical Informatics and Center for Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Dahm is the co-PI for University of California Irvine. Her work for pSCANNER will involve representing the UC ReX network in pSCANNER.  Her research background is in providing resources for biomedical researchers including analytic tools, biospecimens repository, clinical and research data warehouse, clinical trials management system, and laboratory information management system.

Douglas Bell, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Bell is the site PI for University of California Los Angeles. He will oversee the implementation of software, data harmonization, and extraction activities for pSCANNER. In year two, he will oversee the completion of data analysis and manuscript preparation. His research experience includes research data repository development, quality measurement, and survey development.

Mary Whooley, MD, FACP, FAHA, FACC, is the site PI for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a primary care physician, Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology & Biostatistics at UCSF, and Director of Cardiac Rehabilitation at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Dr. Whooley also serves as PI of another PCORI-funded project, entitled "Improving Delivery of Patient-Centered Cardiac Rehabilitation.” Her research is focused on improving health behaviors in patients with cardiovascular disease.

Jason Doctor, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy, University of Southern California. Dr. Doctor is the site PI for University of Southern California. His involvement with pSCANNER will be directing the sub-network of SCANNER. His research experience includes federally funded clinical trials, development and implementation of patient-reported outcome assessments and quality of life measures of patient populations.

Daniella Meeker, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine; Director of Clinical Research Informatics, SC-CTSI; Information Scientist, RAND Corporation. Dr. Meeker has extensive experience with implementation and operation of clinical data research networks and will contributing her expertise to the pSCANNER project. She will lead the technical development of pSCANNER, including work for semantic interoperability across the data sites.

Mike Aratow, MD, Emergency Physician. Dr. Aratow is the site PI for San Mateo Medical Center.

Lisa Schilling, MD, MSPH is a practicing, board-certified internist. She is also board certified in clinical informatics and am health services researcher, who focuses on clinical and research informatics, with an interest in making clinical data valuable for secondary use. Dr. Schilling is looking forward to her role as a co-PI on the pSCANNER Phase II project. On behalf of pSCANNER, her team will focus on data modeling, data quality, and identity management.

Spencer SooHoo, PhD, RISCC Director; Chief Security Officer and Director of Scientific Computing. Dr. SooHoo is the site PI for Cedars-Sinai Medical center. started as a research scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center before moving into IT over 25 years ago. He held a number of IT positions including the director of Infrastructure Technology and Chief Security Officer.

Kari A. Stephens, PhD is a clinical psychologist, biomedical informaticist, and an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Adjunct Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, and the Associate Director of the Behavioral Science and Technology Program. Her research focuses on disadvantaged populations by: adapting evidence-based behavioral practices into medical settings and developing data sharing methods and tools to leverage electronic health data for research.

Jaideep Vaidya, PhD is a Professor in the MSIS Department at Rutgers University. His general area of research is in security, privacy, data mining, and data management.

Adam Wilcox, PhD, is Professor and Chief Analytics Officer of UW Medicine. He has broad experience in both applied and research informatics.

Hua Xu, PhD is Robert H. Graham Professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics in The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). He directs the Center for Computational Biomedicine at UTHealth. Dr. Xu’s primary research interests include biomedical natural language processing (NLP) and data mining. He was the Chair of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) NLP Working Group in 2013-2014.