Meet the Mentors

Dr. Patel is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM). Her research is related to cognitive mechanisms underlying human performance in health care and in medical decision-making; and focuses on addressing issues of cognition in biomedical informatics and building a closer tie between cognitive psychological principles and health information technology. In her past 30+ years career dedicated to academic research and education, Dr. Patel demonstrated her leadership by serving as the Director of the Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Making at Columbia University, an Interim Chair and Vice Chair of Department of BMI at Arizona State University, Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas at Houston, until present Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at NYAM. Dr. Patel has received several distinguished awards and grants recognizing her significant scientific contributions from Sweden, Canada, and United States.

Dr. Ogunyemi is currently Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBI) and Associate Professor in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. She is also an Associate Adjunct Professor of Radiological Sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with the Medical Imaging Informatics group. Research at the CBI focuses on novel biomedical informatics solutions for medically underserved communities. Dr. Ogunyemi’s research interests include computerized medical decision support, reasoning under uncertainty, 3D graphics and visualization, and machine learning. Her current NIH-funded research focuses on developing a variety of machine learning approaches for identifying patients with diabetic retinopathy from EHRs and digital retinal images. She is an editorial board member for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, a member of the AHRQ's Health Information Technology Research study section, a member of AMIA’s Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, and was recently elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (2019).

Dr. Alexa T. McCray is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her research area is in knowledge representation and discovery, with a special focus on the significant problems that persist in the curation, dissemination, and exchange of scientific and clinical information in biomedicine and health. She is the former director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an intramural research division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. While at the NIH, she directed the design and development of a number of national information resources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, Genetics Home Reference, and Profiles in Science. After she joined Harvard Medical School in 2005, she co-founded the Center for Biomedical Informatics, now the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. McCray was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2001. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. She is chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Board on Research Data and Information.

Dr. Rebecca Jacobson is Vice President of Analytics at UPMC Enterprises in Pittsburgh, PA. She joined UPMC Enterprises in June, 2017 after a twenty-year career in academic biomedical informatics. At UPMC, Dr. Jacobson leads a team of engineers and data scientists developing NLP and machine learning applications, leading to commercial solutions. Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Jacobson’s work has focused on extracting meaningful information from electronic medical records to impact population health, precision medicine, and cancer research. She is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (since 2010). Prior to this position, Dr. Jacobson was Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Chief Information Officer for the Institute for Precision Medicine, and Director of the Graduate Training Program in Biomedical Informatics at University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Wendy Chapman is the Associate Dean for Digital Health and Informatics and a Director of a new Centre for Digital Transformation of Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She served as Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City for 6 years and was previously at UCSD and the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on natural language processing of clinical notes. Dr. Chapman is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director. Dr. Chapman also serves at Board of Directors for AMIA and founded the Women in AMIA Committee. When she's not working, she enjoys skiing, bicycling, and cooking.