I am an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering.  I earned an MD from the UCSD School of Medicine, an SM in Medical Informatics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, advised by Pete Szolovits and Staal Vinterbo. I completed my clinical internship at the wonderful Gundersen Health System (where I learned all of the ways that working on a farm can be harmful or fatal. Such as falling into a manure pit and asphyxiating on the hydrogen sulfide. Or jumping in to rescue that person and suffering the same fate. The third - or sometimes fourth - guy usually decides not to jump in.) and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, with Octo Barnett in The Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital and Lucila Ohno-Machado in The Decision Systems Group at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Before switching to computational medicine, my first career was as an optical engineer; I designed and built prototype fiberoptic sensors for aircraft at Science Applications International Corporation and developed the optics for a high-speed optical genetic sequencer at a (now defunct!) startup. My bachelor's degree is in Physics.

Following grad school, where my computer science degree focused on medical machine learning, I was a software engineer at Google, where I worked on unsupervised methods to learn clinically relevant patterns from the thousands of medical books in Google Books and from the mind-bogglingly-massive Google query stream. I also developed the algorithm and prototype for Google Symptom Search, a purely data-driven computational diagnosis engine that uses the entire Web as its input dataset.

My current research interests are in the computational aspects of precision medicine. In particular, I am working on the phenotype discovery problem, which is the effort to infer the clinical phenotypic signatures of every existing disease, using large amounts of Electronic Medical Record data and modern machine-learning methods. We consider current clinical disease labels to be useful abstractions over a set of many different pathophysiologic processes, but the abstractions can also degrade diagnostic and treatment precision. Our hypothesis is that similar but distinct pathophysiologic processes produce similar but distinct imprints on the clinical record. If we can computationally disentangle those imprints, we can illuminate the distinct mechanistic processes active in a given patient, which may help us identify the precise optimal treatment for that patient.

I am/have been funded by generous grants from the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation, and the NIH.

Current primary trainees
Kim (Kondratieff) Cox (PhD Student)
Marco Barbero Mota (PhD Student)

Currently advising, but not as primary mentor. (In my department except where noted.)
Thomas Li (EECS)
Kaiwen Xu (EECS)

Students/Postdocs previously advised, now finished (and where they went next)
Robert Carroll, PhD 2015. (Research Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics)
Yukun Chen, PhD 2016. (NLP Scientist, Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation)
Ravi Atreya, (MSTP) PhD, 2016. (Co-founder and CTO, PredictionHealth)
Dan Putnam, PhD 2016. (Research Scientist, St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital)
Pedro Teixeira, (MSTP) PhD, 2016. (Co-founder and CEO, PredictionHealth)
Jacob VanHouten, (MSTP) PhD, 2016. (Resident, Yale Griffin Internal Medicine/Preventive Medicine)
Morgan Harrell, PhD 2017. (Clinical Data Scientist, Roam Analytics)
Julian Genkins, MD 2018. (Internal Medicine Resident, UCSF))
Sharidan Parr, (MD), MS 2018. (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics)
Mara Kim, PhD 2018. (Machine Learning Engineer, S&P Global Market Intelligence)
Lina Sulieman, PhD 2018. (Postdoc, Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics)
Shikha Chaganti, PhD 2018. (Siemens Healthineers)
Ling Chen, PhD 2019. (Senior Data Scientist, Illumina, Inc.)
Sharon Davis, PhD 2019. (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics)
Diego Mesa, Postdoc 2019. (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt EECS)
Linda Zhang, PhD 2021. (Data Scientist, XSOLIS)
Matt Lenert, PhD 2021. (Lead Data Architect, Careignition)
Colin Hansen, PhD 2021. (AI Scientist, Covera Health)
Riqiang Gao, PhD 2021. (Siemens Healthineers)
Yucheng Tang, PhD 2022. (Siemens Healthineers)
Katie Williamson, (MD), MS 2022. (Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist, Cook Children's Hospital)
Cailey Kerley, PhD 2022. (Data Scientist, Trilliant Health)
Siru Liu, Postdoc 2023. (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics)
Ioana Danciu, PhD 2024. (Research Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Bryan Glazer, PhD 2024. (Postdoc, St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital)

Code repository for my Computational Medicine Lab.

Publications at my Google Scholar page

Patents

US Patent 5,323,229. May BA, Lasko TA, Everett DH. Science Applications International Corporation, assignee. Measurement system using optical coherence shifting interferometry, 1992.

US Patent 8,473,489. Lasko TA, Tomkins A, Angelo M, Gray MK, Ryan R, Godbole NU, Zeiger RF. Google, Inc, assignee. Identifying Entities Using Search Results, 2013. (This and the next three are Google Symptom Search Patents).

US Patent 8,775,439.  Lasko TA, Tomkins A, Angelo M, Gray MK, Ryan R, Godbole NU, Zeiger RF. Google, Inc, assignee. Identifying Entities Using Search Results, 2014.

US Patent 8,843,466. Zeiger RF, Lasko TA, Tomkins A, Angelo M, Gray MK, Ryan R, Godbole NU. Google, Inc, assignee. Identifying Entities Using Search Results, 2014.

US Patent 8,856,099. Lasko TA, Tomkins A, Angelo M, Gray MK, Ryan R, Godbole NU, Zeiger RF. Google, Inc, assignee. Identifying Entities Using Search Results, 2014.

Peilin Jia, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbil University. Her research interests focus on understanding the basis of genetic abnormalities in complex diseases, including psychiatric diseases and different types of cancer. Her current projects include developing systems biology approaches for genetic data analysis.

Dr. Jia received her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She received postdoctoral training at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vanderbilt University.

Dario A. Giuse, Dr. Ing., MS, is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine.  He has long-standing research interests in the application of computer systems to facilitate real-world work processes. After joining the faculty of the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University, he spearheaded the effort to implement the StarChart electronic patient record system and the StarPanel EHR,. The systems provide an integrated, longitudinal patient record that contains all structured data, free-text documents, reports, and scanned images for both inpatient and outpatient encounters. The system is used interactively via a Web front-end for clinical patient care and research, and as the back-end repository for automated decision support tools. StarPanel was the VUMC EHR from 2001 up to 2017, when the eStar system became operational.  His current activities center around the Health Data Repository (HDR) and the Word Cloud.  The HDR is the logical extension of the Star repository and stores all historical and current data, documents, and images.  The Word Cloud builds on the HDR by providing automated NLP-based extraction of all relevant clinical concepts from documents (and optionally images via OCR) in real time, resulting in the conceptual, time-based indexing of all clinical documentation using the UMLS terminology.

During his 14 years on the faculty of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, he was involved in long-term research projects on human-computer interaction, constraint-based object oriented programming, computer aided design, computer system architecture design tools, and interactive computer graphics. His graduate research was in the area of synchronous controllers for multi-arm industrial robots.

As an adjunct faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, he was the main architect of the QMR-KAT knowledge acquisition tool, the first knowledge editor to be used for large-scale, multi-center medical knowledge acquisition. With his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, he conducted a systematic evaluation of the costs of long-term maintenance of medical knowledge bases, documenting statistically significant inter-rater reproducibility for the extraction of medical knowledge from the literature.

He has served as a member of the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, the Regional Editor of Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, and as the co-chair of IMIA Working Group 10 on Health Information Systems.

Dr. Giuse received an M.S. in Pure and Applied Mathematical Logic from Carnegie Mellon University and a Dr.Ing. ("Dottore in Ingegneria") degree from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

In March 2020, Cynthia Gadd, PhD, MS, MBA, became the inaugural holder of the Randolph A. Miller, M.D., Directorship in Biomedical Informatics Education at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she also has served as vice chair for educational affairs and professor of biomedical informatics.

She earned a doctorate in information systems and cognitive science from the University of Pittsburgh, a master of science in medical informatics during her post- doctoral fellowship at Duke University, and a master of business administration from Winthrop University. As faculty and leader at the University of Pittsburgh and then Vanderbilt, she has become a nationally known expert in biomedical informatics education and training. In addition to serving as the Department of Biomedical Informatics director of graduate studies and principal investigator of the National Library of Medicine T15 training grant, she has guided the establishment of new and expanding programs, including the clinical informatics subspecialty fellowship, a master of science in applied clinical informatics, global health informatics training in Nigeria and India, and opportunities that introduce informatics research to Vanderbilt undergraduates, medical students and summer interns.

She has published numerous articles in her primary area of research, implementation and evaluation that address integrated clinical information system functionality and effectiveness, as well as user and organizational impacts. Her contributions to informatics education and the professionalism of the discipline have been recognized through numerous honors and awards. She was elected to the American College of Medical Informatics, twice received the American Medical Informatics Association Leadership Award, and was elected to the Vanderbilt Academy for Excellence in Teaching. She served as the executive director of advanced health informatics certification for AMIA, which has led to the development of the first advanced health informatics certification available to professionals with clinical public health and computer science or health informatics training.

Latest update on 7/1/21

Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS is the former Professor and Chair of Biomedical Informatics, with a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and his MS in Medical Informatics from Stanford University. In 1992 he returned to Johns Hopkins where he served as a Pediatric Chief Resident. He was a member of the faculty in both Pediatrics and Biomedical Information Sciences at Johns Hopkins until 2002, when he was recruited to Vanderbilt University. He also is a board certified Pediatrician.

Dr. Johnson is an internationally-respected developer and evaluator of clinical information technology. His research interests have been related to developing and encouraging the adoption of clinical information systems to improve patient safety and compliance with practice guidelines; the uses of advanced computer technologies, including the Worldwide Web, personal digital assistants, and pen-based computers in medicine; and the development of computer-based documentation systems for the point of care. In the early phases of his career, he directed the development and evaluation of evidence-based pediatric care guidelines for The Johns Hopkins Hospital.  He has been principal investigator on numerous grants, and has been an invited speaker at most major medical informatics and pediatrics conferences.

He is the author of over 150 publications and books or book chapters.  He is a former recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Award and is also a recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics Byron B. Oberst Award in recognition of his informatics education efforts. At Vanderbilt, he has been a member of the Academy for Excellence in Education since 2008.  He was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics in 2004, The Academic Pediatric Society in 2010, and the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine) in 2010. He has held numerous leadership positions within the American Medical Informatics Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Dr. Johnson leads the American Board of Pediatrics Informatics Advisory Committee, directs the NLM's Board of Scientific Counselors, and is a member of the NIH Council of Councils.

Mark Frisse, MD, MS, is Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. His work focuses on the intersection between health care informatics, economics, policy, and health care transformation. His primary research is directed toward an understanding of economic sustainability and toward the development of technical and administrative measures to enable effective care coordination and to ensure the integrity of security and privacy efforts. 

In Tennessee, Dr. Frisse led the development and oversight of a six-year federal- and state-sponsored effort to create and operate a health information exchange for the greater Memphis area. This exchange currently has over 7 million records covering the care of over 1.2 million individuals and is now managed completely by a Memphis-based board and a commercial vendor. He has also worked with other states and communities to develop their HIT programs. He also directed the the executive-level Masters of Management in Health Care program at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management.

A board certified internist, Dr. Frisse was a Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean at Washington University School of Medicine and he served as academic director of the Health Services Executive MBA program at the John M. Olin School of Business. In his capacity as Associate Dean, he served as the Director of the Bernard Becker Medical Library and established the School's first common technology infrastructure supporting networks, email, educational computing, and digital library services. He founded the Medical Informatics Laboratory within the Department of Medicine and served as a Director of a National Library of Medicine Training Program in Biomedical Informatics. In collaboration with the BJC System, he and his colleagues developed several innovative applications for adverse drug event prevention. He also developed early hypertext systems and directed an IAIMS Planning Grant. 

Prior to assuming his position at Vanderbilt, Dr. Frisse was Vice President in First Consulting Group’s Clinical Transformation Practice working to advance quality and safety through the application of technology, process redesign, evaluation techniques, and evidence-based practice. His experience includes quality and financial analysis, key metrics assessment, clinical visioning, strategy, vendor selection, pre-implementation planning, and clinical quality program alignment. In addition to participating in numerous short-term planning and evaluation engagements, Dr. Frisse served as an operational Vice President overseeing two large-scale transformation and clinical systems implementation efforts.

Prior to joining First Consulting Group, Dr. Frisse was Chief Medical Officer and Vice President, Clinical Information Services at Express Scripts, one of the Nation's largest independent pharmaceutical benefits management concerns. He served as general manager for their Practice Patterns Science subsidiary - a firm applying integrated medical and pharmaceutical claims data to reduce practice variation to a client list that included Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Missouri and Humana. He participated in the formation of RxHub - a new approach to electronic transmission of prescriptions from physicians to pharmacies. He was also responsible for the Express Scripts' DrugDigest consumer Web site and was active in the development of Express Scripts' consumer e-business strategy.

Dr. Frisse received his MD and MBA from Washington University and received a master’s degree in Medical Information Science from Stanford University. Active in medical informatics for 20 years, he is the author of approximately 60 scientific papers, reviews, and book chapters on medical informatics. He served as a consultant for numerous government agencies and health care concerns. He was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Enhancing the Internet for Health Applications and more recently was an author of a national report on ePrescribing prepared by the eHealth Initiative. He also has authored works on laboratory data exchange interoperability and the financial impact of e-prescribing.  He serves on the Board of the NCPDP Foundation. Previously, he served on the boards of the eHealth Initiative and SureScripts, LLC. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Fern FitzHenry, RN, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Her research interests are in improving the management of pain, the identification of medication errors and adverse events, concept identification in electronic medical records,  the impact on processes of system adoption, natural language processing, and data harmonization for electronic surveillance. At Vanderbilt, she played a central role in building the business case and requirements definition for multiple applications including evaluation of alerts from barcode medication alerts, educational informatics, electronic prescribing, embedding SNOMED coding into structured notes, and surrogates/delegates for the patient portal.

Dr. Fitzhenry is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives and a retired Colonel from the United States Air Force Reserve.  She holds a graduate degree in business from Northwestern University in addition to her BSN and PhD from the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Stephany Duda, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Her work focuses on clinical research informatics and global health informatics, particularly issues in data capture, data quality, and international observational databases.  Over the past several years, Dr. Duda has (in association with Dr. Paul Harris and Dr. Firas Wehbe) led the development and a highly popular Coursera course on Data Management for Clinical Research.

Dr. Duda received her BS in computer science from Princeton University and her MS and PhD in biomedical informatics from Vanderbilt University.

Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., FACMI is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine. He completed an internal medicine residency as a Tinsley Harrison Scholar at Vanderbilt. His interest in medical informatics began while in medical school with the development of a concept-based curriculum database to improve medical education. Other interests include natural language processing, accurate phenotype identification from electronic medical record data, and using the electronic medical record to discover genome-phenome associations to better understand disease and drug response, including the development of the EMR-based phenome-wide association (PheWAS).

He has been involved with the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative and currently leads the All of Us(sm) Research Program Data and Research Center.  He is also PI for Vanderbilt sites in the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN), and the Implementing Genomics Into Practice (IGNITE) Network.  At Vanderbilt, he is also part of the PREDICT (Pharmacogenomic Resource for Enhanced Decisions in Care and Treatment)program, which prospectively genotypes patients to tailor drug response.

Dr. Denny serves on several local committees and remains active in teaching medical students and clinical roles.  He received the Homer Warner award from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in 2008 and 2009.  He received the AMIA New Investigator Award in 2012 and was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics in 2013, He was elected into the American College of Medical Informatics in 2013, the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2018.