Faculty

Peter Dayan, MD is Associate Professor of Pediatrics. He has served as a principal investigator of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) for 13 years and has been principal investigator of several PECARN studies. Dr. Dayan’s research focuses on optimizing diagnostic assessment of children with minor head trauma, seizures, and fever, and using risk stratification models in clinical decision support. His research has also focused on dissemination and implementation science, serving as principal investigator of a multi-center study to develop and test the effectiveness of clinical decision support in the EHR to safely minimize the use of computed tomography for children with minor head trauma.

Carol Friedman, PhD is Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Director of the Graduate Training Program in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Friedman’s research interests include natural language processing, text mining, knowledge representation, medication safety, and pharmacovigilance. She developed MedLEE (Medical Language Extraction and Encoding System), one of the leading natural language processing systems in the field. Her research focuses on using data in the patient medical record and from other sources to improve drug safety. She has developed methods to detect drug overuse and adverse drug events through natural language processing, statistical, and knowledge-based methods. Dr. Friedman is principal investigator of a study to identify serious adverse drug reactions using automated methods that combine information from large and varied patient populations, national reporting systems, and the clinical literature. She is using pharmacogenomics information in her research to detect possible adverse events due to genomic variations in drug metabolism.

George Hripcsak, MD, MS, FACMI is Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor, Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Director of Medical Informatics Services for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Hripcsak has broad research interests, including clinical decision support, natural language processing, observational research, data mining, health information exchange, precision medicine, and public policy related to informatics. Dr. Hripcsak is principal investigator of the Observational Health Data Science and Informatics (OHDSI) collaborative, which includes 140 researchers from 14 countries and over 600 million health records. In his work in precision medicine, Dr. Hripcsak is principal investigator on the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network grant, and multiple principal investigator on Columbia’s regional recruitment center for the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program.

Elaine Larson, PhD, RN, FAAN, CIC is Professor of Pharmaceutical and Therapeutic Research, Associate Dean for Research at the Columbia University School of Nursing, and Co-Director of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research Pilot and Collaborative Studies. Her research focuses on infection prevention and control using health information technology, with a particular emphasis on underserved populations. Dr. Larson is principal investigator of a study to examine the impact on hospital-acquired infections on nursing care demands and outbreaks of community infectious diseases using data from ~1 million discharges from four hospitals. Dr. Larson completed a large CDC-funded project to assess the impact of electronic surveillance on adherence to isolation precautions for MRSA.

Lena Mamykina, PhD is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Her research focuses on using novel computing technologies to develop communication tools for members of interdisciplinary clinical teams caring for patients with chronic disease, create social computing platforms for online health communities, improve nutrition literacy and dietary behaviors among patients with diabetes, and develop innovative approaches to problem-solving and self-management of diabetes. Dr. Mamykina is currently principal investigator of a project to develop and rigorously evaluate an intervention that uses computational methods to correlate fluctuations in blood glucose levels with individuals’ behavioral patterns captured by self-monitoring technologies, and provide feedback to reinforce and promote positive behaviors.

Vimla Patel, PhD is Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at New York Academy of Medicine, where she directs the 5-year James S. McDonnell Foundation research project “Complexity and Error in Health Care.” Dr. Patel’s research focuses on the intersection of biomedical informatics and cognitive psychology in healthcare, including the impact of technology on human cognition and performance, group decision-making in critical care, and medical errors using health IT systems. Dr. Patel’s research examined errors in complex clinical environments, where interruption, information and task overload, and challenges using health IT compromise patient safety. She is principal investigator of a study to examine the impact of meaningful use criteria on information seeking, team-interaction, and decision-making among ED clinicians at two urban hospitals to inform patient safety guidelines for EHRs.

Susan Rosenthal, PhD, ABPP is Professor of Behavioral Medicine, Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Health, and Vice Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Pediatrics. As Division Director, Dr. Rosenthal oversees all pediatric quality assurance projects conducted in inpatient and outpatient settings, and co-leads training programs to enhance skills of faculty to rigorously address patient safety issues. Her research focuses on promotion of sexual health among underserved and vulnerable youth, acceptability of vaccines, microbicides, and multi-purpose technologies, the role of families in promoting sexual health, and adolescent participation in reproductive clinical trials. She recently completed a study to assess factors that influence adolescent participation in STI prevention trials; fellows will have the opportunity to explore the rich qualitative and quantitative data from this study to answer additional research questions.

Jingjing Shang, PhD, RN is Assistant Professor of Nursing at Columbia University School of Nursing. Dr. Shang’s research interests include healthcare-associated infection (HAI), infection control in the hospital and home care settings, and statistical modeling. She also has collaborated on interdisciplinary health services research to examine the relationships between patient safety, quality of care, and nurse organizational factors. Dr. Shang’s research on HAIs has focused on identifying risk factors, examining the relationship between hospital nurse staffing and HAIs, and developing predictive risk models to guide infection prevention and control in the home care setting to reduce readmissions. She is principal investigator of a study to develop and test a predictive risk model to identify patients at high-risk for infection, assess current infection control practices, and explore how risk modeling can be utilized in clinical practice. ​

Melissa Stockwell, MD, MPH is Florence Irving Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Professor of Population and Family Health, and Associate Director of the Pediatric Research at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Stockwell’s research focuses on health IT interventions to improve vaccination rates among underserved pediatric, obstetric, and adult populations, and for surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases and adverse events. She is principal investigator on five federally funded grants, including a randomized trial assessing the effect of text message reminders on HPV vaccine completion rates among minority adolescents, and another randomized trial testing the effect of tailored reminders for providers on immunization rates in a low-income, urban, pediatric population. Dr. Stockwell is Co-Director of the Division of General Medicine’s Primary Care Research Fellowship.