I'm the Assoc. Center Director for Biomedical Informatics at the VA Boston Healthcare System and an assistant clinical professor with an appointment at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital.  Prior to joining the VA and the Center, I received a PhD from UCLA  where I was a National Library of Medicine Medical Informatics Fellow working with the Medical Imaging Informatics Group.  Before receiving my PhD, I received a Master's degree in Computer and Information Systems from the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley College.  I also worked for several years in software development and systems analysis, mostly in customizing and implementing large-scale enterprise software packages.  

My research is focused on the secondary use of clinical data to measure and understand the quality of delivered health care.  Toward that end, I develop and implement automated approaches (NLP, data & text mining, etc.) to access and analyze information in the medical record.  I also employ quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the strengths and weaknesses of clinical data for use as evidence toward outcomes assessment & pay-for-performance initiatives.