Bio: David O. Meltzer is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and Chair of the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Chicago, where he is Professor in the Department of Medicine, and affiliated faculty at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. Dr. Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost and quality of hospital care. He is currently leading a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation Challenge award to study the effects of improved continuity in the doctor patient relationship between the inpatient and outpatient setting on the costs and outcomes of care for frequently hospitalized Medicare patients. He led the formation of the Chicago Learning Effectiveness Advancement Research Network (Chicago LEARN) that helped pioneer collaboration of Chicago-Area academic medical centers in hospital-based comparative effectiveness research and the recent support of the Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network (CAPriCORN) by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Meltzer received his MD and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Meltzer is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lee Lusted Prize of the Society for Medical Decision Making, the Health Care Research Award of the National Institute for Health Care Management, and the Eugene Garfield Award from Research America. Meltzer is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and past president of the Society for Medical Decision Making. He has served on several IOM panels, include one examining U.S. organ allocation policy and the recent panel on the Learning Health Care System that produced Best Care at Lower Cost. He also has served on the DHHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Healthy People 2020, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Methodology Committee, as a Council Member of the National Institute for General Medical Studies, and as a health economics advisor for the Congressional Budget Office.
Bio: Dr. Dempsey is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and an Assistant Research Professor in the d3lab located in the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on Statistical Methods for Digital and Mobile Health. His current work involves three complementary research themes: (1) experimental design and data analytic methods to inform multi-stage decision making in health; (2) statistical modeling of complex longitudinal and survival data; and (3) statistical modeling of complex relational structures such as interaction networks. Prior to joining, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. His fellowship was in the Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab under the supervision of Susan Murphy. He received my PhD in Statistics at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Peter McCullagh.
Bio: F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE, is a nephrologist who treats patients in Yale New Haven Hospital who have kidney issues or who developed one while hospitalized for another problem. He is also an epidemiologist and a prolific researcher focused on studying ways to improve patient care. An associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Wilson is director of the Yale Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator and codirector of the Yale Section of Nephrology’s Human Genetics and Clinical Research Core. He is the creator of the popular online course Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend Is Wrong" on the Coursera platform."
Bio: Kyra Gan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and Cornell Tech at Cornell University. Her research interests include adaptive/online algorithm design in personalized treatment (including micro-randomized trials and N-of-1 trials) under constraint settings, computerized/automated inference methods (e.g., targeted learning with RKHS), robust causal discovery in medical data, and fairness in organ transplants. More broadly, she is interested in bridging the gap between research and practice in healthcare.
Prior to Cornell Tech, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Statistical Reinforcement Lab at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research in 2022 from Carnegie Mellon University at the Tepper School of Business. She received her B.A.s in Mathematics and Economics from Smith College in 2017. She is a recipient of the 2021 Pierskalla Best Paper Award and the 2021 CHOW Best Student Paper Award in the Category of Operations Research and Management Science.
Bio: Girish N. Nadkarni, MD, MPH, is the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As an expert physician-scientist, Dr. Nadkarni bridges the gap between comprehensive clinical care and innovative research. He is the System Chief of the Division of Data Driven and Digital Medicine (D3M), the Co-Director of the Mount Sinai Clinical Intelligence Center (MSCIC) and the Director of Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine.
Before completing his medical degree at one of the top-ranked medical colleges in India, Dr. Nadkarni received training in mathematics. He then received a master’s degree in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and then was a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. Dr. Nadkarni completed his residency in internal medicine and his clinical fellowship in nephrology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He then completed a research fellowship in personalized medicine and informatics.
Dr. Nadkarni has authored more than 240 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Annals of Internal Medicine and Nature Medicine. Dr. Nadkarni is the principal or co-investigator for several grants funded by the National Institutes of Health focusing on informatics, data science, and precision medicine. He is also one of the multiple principal investigators of the NIH RECOVER consortium focusing on the long-term sequelae of COVID-19. He has several patents and is also the scientific co-founder of investor-backed companies—one of which, Renalytix, is listed on NASDAQ. In recognition of his work as an active clinician and investigator, he has received several awards and honors, including the Dr. Harold and Golden Lamport Research Award, the Deal of the Year award from Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, the Carl Nacht Memorial Lecture, and the Rising Star Award from ANIO.
Bio: Roy Perlis, MD MSc is Associate Chief for Research in the Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Quantitative Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Editor at JAMA's open-access journal, JAMA Network - Open. Dr. Perlis graduated from Brown University, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, and completed his residency, chief residency, and clinical/research fellowship at MGH before joining the faculty. Dr. Perlis's research is focused on identifying predictors of treatment response in brain diseases, and using these biomarkers to develop novel treatments. Dr. Perlis has authored more than 350 articles reporting original research, in journals including Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, JAMA, NEJM, the British Medical Journal, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. His research has been supported by awards from NIMH, NHGRI, NHLBI, NICHD, NCCIH, and NSF, among others. In 2010 Dr. Perlis was awarded the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance's Klerman Award; he now serves as a scientific advisor to the DBSA.
Bio: Dr. Ashley Beecy is the Medical Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Operations at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). She is a core member of NYP’s AI leadership team partnering with clinical, administrative and research leaders across the enterprise to drive digital transformation and deliver on NYP’s data and AI strategy. Dr. Beecy provides leadership in key areas including the governance, processes, and infrastructure to ensure the responsible and agile deployment of AI. She is responsible for NYP’s largest enterprise-wide AI initiative in collaboration with Cornell Tech and Cornell University. She is a thought leader and serves as a subject matter expert on multiple national AI collaboratives.
Bio: Leo Anthony Celi has practiced medicine in three continents, giving him broad perspectives in healthcare delivery. As clinical research director and principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory of Computational Physiology (LCP), he brings together clinicians and data scientists to support research using data routinely collected in the intensive care unit (ICU). His group built and maintains the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) database. This public-access database has been meticulously de-identified and is freely shared online with the research community. It is an unparalleled research resource; over 2000 investigators from more than 30 countries have free access to the clinical data under a data use agreement. In 2016, LCP partnered with Philips eICU Research Institute to host the eICU database with more than 2 million ICU patients admitted across the United States. The goal is to scale the database globally and build an international collaborative research community around health data analytics.
Leo founded and co-directs Sana, a cross-disciplinary organization based at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, whose objective is to leverage information technology to improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. At its core is an open-source mobile tele-health platform that allows for capture, transmission and archiving of complex medical data (e.g. images, videos, physiologic signals such as ECG, EEG and oto-acoustic emission responses), in addition to patient demographic and clinical information. Sana is the inaugural recipient of both the mHealth (Mobile Health) Alliance Award from the United Nations Foundation and the Wireless Innovation Award from the Vodafone Foundation in 2010. The software has since been implemented around the globe including India, Kenya, Lebanon, Haiti, Mongolia, Uganda, Brazil, Ethiopia, Argentina, and South Africa.
He is one of the course directors for HST.936—global health informatics to improve quality of care, and HST.953—secondary analysis of electronic health records, both at MIT. He is an editor of the textbook for each course, both released under an open access license. The textbook Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records came out in October 2016 and was downloaded over 48,000 times in the first two months of publication. The course “Global Health Informatics to Improve Quality of Care” was launched under MITx in February 2017.
Leo was featured as a designer in the Smithsonian Museum National Design Triennial “Why Design Now?” held at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City in 2010 for his work in global health informatics. He was also selected as one of 12 external reviewers for the National Academy of Medicine 2014 report “Investing in Global Health Systems: Sustaining gains, transforming lives”.