Aliya Gifford, PhD

Aliya is a staff scientist (data scientist in training) working with Dr. Josh Denny in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. Her work focuses on the analytics and support systems for medical informatics, particularly geocoding and environmental data.

Aliya completed her undergraduate studies at Randolph Macon Woman’s College earning a B.S. in physics, followed by a Master’s in physics at Virginia Tech. After a few years as a research assistant in the Neurogenetics Department at the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) in Baltimore Maryland, she enrolled in a doctorate program at Vanderbilt University. It was at KKI that she developed an interest in the medical imaging field, a field she continued to pursue in her doctorate research. She completed her doctorate degree in Chemical and Physical Biology at Vanderbilt University, focusing on improving detection and quantification of adult human brown adipose tissue using multi-modality imaging.