Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education > News and Events

News and Events

Chair’s Message

pth-use-this-one We are moving toward our vision with a number of activities across our various programs. We have updated our strategic plan in response to the 10-year academic program review that we recently completed. For our research-oriented MS and PhD programs, we added a specialization in Data Science. We are completing a curriculum revision for our on line applied clinical informatics MS. The work of our fellows in the clinical informatics fellowship program has received plaudits from clinical administrators and faculty. We are at the beginning of a new cycle of admissions to our graduate programs, and we look forward to another productive year and new growth in our department.

Cordially,

Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, MD
Chair and Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

New Global Rankings for UW

In the summer of 2026, the University of Washington was recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best universities in the world.

Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter

November 2, 2026 – November 6, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Jim Phuong, MSPH, PhD
Thursday, November 12^th – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present in-person

Details and Flyer to come next week!

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Science in Medicine Lecture: Ana Weil, MD, MPH

Join us for the November lecture in the 2026-27 Science in Medicine Lecture series featuring Dr. Ana Weil from the Department of Medicine Division of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

Dr. Weil’s research aims to improve prevention of enteric infections and enhance oral vaccine effectiveness by understanding how the gut microbiota influences disease susceptibility and immune responses to vaccination. In collaboration with scientists at International Center for Diarrheal Diseases research in Bangladesh, her lab studies people affected by cholera to identify microbial factors that contribute to disease severity and vaccine protection, with the goal of informing strategies to reduce illness and improve public health.

Wednesday, November 18
12 pm – 1 pm
UW Medicine South Lake Union Orin Smith Auditorium and Zoom Webinar

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Finding Common Ground – BIME Fall Social Hour

Dear BIME faculty, students, fellows, and staff,

You are invited to join us on Thursday, 11/19 from 4-5pm on the main campus in H-226 for an hour of community-building games and activities, fun, mocktails, and pie!

Funded with support from an Inclusive Community Building Support for Trainees grant through the RGE office, this is the first of four events in our Finding Common Ground series bringing the whole BIME community together in fun and meaningful ways that cultivate connection and a better understanding of our backgrounds and stories. Be ready for a pie buffet complete with whipped cream paired with delicious autumn mocktails served up in our on-campus dedicated student space. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Dr. Angad Singh, MD, Associate Chief Medical Information Officer and Clinical Associate Professor in BIME, is one of 43 AMIA members who have been recognized as 2027 FAMIA Fellows, joining a distinguished community of 733 Fellows, 2027 Class of Fellows of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). FAMIA recognizes AMIA members who apply informatics skills and knowledge in practice and have demonstrated professional achievement, leadership, and a sustained commitment to the betterment of AMIA. The accomplishments of this year’s inductees reflect the breadth, impact, and innovation of our informatics community. Congratulations, Dr. Singh, on this well-deserved recognition!

PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Amber (Ya-Lin) Chen, Cindy Zhang, Fabienne Lucas, Jennifer Hadlock and Brody Foy’s article, “Deep phenotyping of blood cell data reveals novel clinical biomarkers” was published in Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. PMID 42935273.

COMMUNITY BUILDING Top of Form
Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit

Faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, residents, fellows, and students from across the University of Washington are invited to attend the 2nd Annual Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit on Friday, November 20, 2026, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. The summit will be held in Zillow Commons at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Hosted by the Department of Neurology, Department of Neurobiology & Biophysics, and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, this interdisciplinary event brings together researchers, clinicians, educators, and trainees to explore innovative approaches to neuroscience and foster new collaborations across fields.

The day will feature:

Opening remarks from University President Robert J. Jones, Ph.D.
Presentations from leading experts in neuroscience, medicine, engineering, ethics, and technology
Discussions on emerging discoveries and advances at the intersection of brain science and computation
Lightning talks from trainees
Opportunities to network with colleagues from across the university and beyond
A keynote address and closing panel discussion featuring Christopher Rozell, Ph.D., Julian T. Hightower Chair and Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Attendees are welcome to participate in the full-day program or join individual sessions based on their interests and availability. A complete agenda is attached. Space is limited, so we recommend that you RSVP as soon as possible to reserve your seat. The form will close when capacity is reached.

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/tEG38twVRi8AFMST7

If you are a student or trainee interested in presenting your work in a lightning talk, please use this form to submit your pitch. Selected presenters will receive a travel grant to share their work at a conference of their choice.

We hope you will join us for a day of discovery, collaboration, and conversation as we work together to break barriers in neuroscience.

Best regards,
The Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit Organizing Committee

October 26, 2026 – October 30, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Yuan Luo, PhD
Thursday, November 5^th – 11-11:50 am
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present Via Zoom, No In-Person Option

Title:
Harnessing AI to power research and innovation: Bench ⇄ Bedside

Abstract:
This talk explores how AI can connect molecular discovery with clinical evidence. Examples include SOAR, a spatial transcriptomics resource for investigating tissue organization and cell-cell interactions, and multimodal AI approaches that integrate emulated clinical trials to support therapeutic discovery. The talk also introduces the vision for CRITICAL 2.0, a national consortium combining longitudinal clinical data, federated infrastructure, and AI to study critical illness and treatment response. These efforts highlight opportunities for collaboration between biostatistics and biomedical informatics in causal inference, rigorous validation, and translating complex data into actionable evidence.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Luo is Chief Data Officer at UW Medicine, and Professor at Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington. He leads institution-wide data and AI strategy spanning clinical care, research, and education, translating advanced AI methods into durable, governed, and scalable enterprise capabilities. Globally recognized for his leadership and contributions to healthcare AI, Dr. Luo has been elected as Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI).

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You’re invited to our hybrid AMIA Student Practice Talks, where you can see and provide feedback to BHI students presenting at the upcoming AMIA conference!

Date/Time: Nov 5, 2026 01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Location: SLU C359
or
Join Zoom Meeting
https://washington.zoom.us/j/91510290462
Meeting ID: 915 1029 0462

Schedule

1:30-2:00 — Zhaoyi Sun
2:00-2:30 — Feng Chen
2:30-3:00 — Carolin Spice
3:00-3:15 — Bio break
3:15-3:30 — Erin Doherty
3:30-4:00 — Yongsen Tan
4:00-4:30 — Aishwarya Raj
4:30-5:00 — Chak Charoensilpchai

ANNOUNCEMENTS
The BIME EDI Committee is pleased to announce that we have been awarded an Inclusive Community-Building Support for Research Trainees grant from the UW Medicine Research Graduate Education Office to fund our “Finding Common Ground” series in AY26-27. Designed with the aim of creating a more inclusive and supportive environment for trainees, our 6-part event series provides specific opportunities for voices to be heard and relationships with mentors and community members strengthened. Four community-building events will bring the whole BIME community together in fun and meaningful ways that cultivate connection and a better understanding of our backgrounds and stories. In addition, two listening workshops facilitated by the Office of Healthcare Equity Center for Restorative Practices will garner student input and share feedback with faculty to create common ground and foster mentor-mentee relationships. Keep an eye out for invites throughout the year and plan on joining us for our first event on November 19th – details to follow soon!

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Oliver Bear Don’t Walk:
“We successfully ran a community workshop on the 17^th titled “Reimagining Health Data Through Lived Experiences of Chronic Health Conditions”. We worked with over 14 community members including Elders and Tribal health data professionals to tell stories about health/wellbeing and how stories can be better represented through data. This was a fantastic collaboration between UW and the University of Sheffield funded through UW’s Global Innovation Fund. I want to give a special thanks to the BIME volunteers who helped make this happen: Wanda Pratt, Carolin Spice, and Danner Peter!”

COMMUNITY BUILDING Top of Form
Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit

The day will feature:

Opening remarks from University President Robert J. Jones, Ph.D.
Presentations from leading experts in neuroscience, medicine, engineering, ethics, and technology
Discussions on emerging discoveries and advances at the intersection of brain science and computation
Lightning talks from trainees
Opportunities to network with colleagues from across the university and beyond
A keynote address and closing panel discussion featuring Christopher Rozell, Ph.D., Julian T. Hightower Chair and Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/tEG38twVRi8AFMST7

We hope you will join us for a day of discovery, collaboration, and conversation as we work together to break barriers in neuroscience.

Best regards,
The Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit Organizing Committee

October 19, 2026 – October 23, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenters for NLM Panel: Erica Stutz PhD Student, Saleh Ramezani,PhD, Alex VanHelene PhD Student
Thursday, October 29^th – 11-11:50 am
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present Via Zoom, No In-Person Option

Speaker Erica Stutz

Title: Counterfactual Outcome Estimation in Medical Foundation Models

Abstract: Medical foundation models have the potential to transform clinical decision-making by predicting future clinical events from longitudinal health data. Current approaches often rely on Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the likelihood of downstream events, requiring thousands of predicted tokens across many simulated patient trajectories and thereby limiting their deployment in real-world clinical settings. To address this limitation, we propose incorporating clinical event estimation into the pre-training stage of medical foundation models. We introduce a method which jointly predicts next-token likelihoods and sequence-level attributes (e.g. clinical outcomes, time passage) conditional on each possible next-token. This framework enables estimation of attribute likelihoods from a single forward pass, eliminating the need for computationally expensive sampling over simulated trajectories. This method also provides clinically relevant insights by supporting explainability, elucidating how individual observations or interventions influence predicted outcomes, and counterfactuals, estimating how outcomes would change under alternative treatment decisions and enabling applications such as target trial emulation.

Speaker Bio: Erica is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics at Yale University, advised by Dr. Andrew Loza. Her research focuses on developing novel methods for counterfactual outcome estimation in medical foundation models to support dynamic prediction and causal inference from longitudinal health data. Erica received a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics, with a fulfilled minor in Biology, from Swarthmore College.

Speaker Saleh Ramenzani

Title: From Subjective Diagnosis to Quantitative Decision Support: AI for Inflammatory Breast Cancer

Abstract: Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer that remains challenging to diagnose because it relies largely on subjective clinical criteria. In this talk, I will discuss our development of a deep learning framework that analyzes multiparametric breast MRI to distinguish IBC from non-inflammatory locally advanced breast cancer. I will highlight how integrating quantitative imaging features with routinely available clinical findings improves diagnostic performance, achieving an AUC of 0.926. I will also discuss our ongoing efforts to bring this technology into clinical practice, including a multi-reader study evaluating radiologists’ diagnostic performance with and without AI assistance.

Speaker Bio: Saleh Ramezani, PhD, is a National Library of Medicine (NLM) postdoctoral fellow in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science in the Department of Radiation Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He earned his PhD in Medical Physics from MD Anderson in 2023. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, quantitative medical imaging, and clinical informatics, with an emphasis on developing computational tools to support cancer diagnosis and treatment. His recent work includes the development of an AI-based diagnostic decision-support framework for inflammatory breast cancer. He has also contributed to research in molecular imaging, radiation oncology, and biomedical engineering.

Speaker Alex VanHelene

Title: Agentic Metadata Harmonization and Gene Expression Representation Learning for Large-Scale Integration of Public Transcriptomic Data

Abstract: 26 of 36 computational biomedical scientists interviewed through our Regional I-Corps program identified biomedical data harmonization as a major burden. Similarly, a cross-sectional survey of data scientists found that 60% of respondents spent most of their time on cleaning and organizing data. This burden is especially evident in public biomedical data repositories like the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), where data formats vary across submitted studies. To address this challenge, we developed an agentic workflow that uses large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) to autonomously harmonize biomedical data. Based on user instructions, LLM-based agents curate analysis-ready datasets by harmonizing metadata annotations and molecular data formats across independent GEO cohorts. Our framework is accessible through a web app interface and includes human-in-the-loop auditing and prompt engineering to guide the curation process and validate cohort integration. Additionally, we benchmarked gene expression harmonization methods for integrating microarray and RNA-seq data. These included traditional statistical approaches such as Feature-Specific Quantile Normalization (FSQN) and the empirical Bayes method ComBat. Furthermore, we developed a deep learning approach that maps microarray (MA) and RNA-seq data into a shared representation, reducing platform-specific effects while preserving biological signal. Our approach uses adversarial deep learning to align MA and RNA-seq data by learning representations with reduced technical artifacts. Specifically, an adversarial classifier attempts to predict each sample’s platform from its learned representation. The representation-learning network is trained to produce representations from which the classifier cannot reliably distinguish MA from RNA-seq samples. Our adversarial deep learning approach reduced platform-specific artifacts while preserving reconstruction fidelity and molecular subtype signals.

Speaker Bio: Alex VanHelene is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biomedical Informatics. His research interests include data harmonization and precision medicine. More specifically, he is interested in how Large Language Models (LLMs) can make tedious data harmonization tasks more scalable. Additionally, he is interested in how deep learning can uncover clinically relevant cancer biology.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Join the BIME and UW Medicine community as we gather to celebrate the start of Native American Heritage Month by attending the flag-raising ceremony here at South Lake Union (SLU) on Thurs. 10/29/26 from 12-12:15pm. The brief ceremony will be held on the outside walkway between buildings E and F. We look forward to seeing you there!

Native American Heritage Month Flag-Raising

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Help shape the future of research at the UW

UW faculty, senior research staff, and research administrators can help shape the future of research at the UW by participating in a new Research Resilience and Transformation Network. The group will provide UW leadership with advice on emerging issues in research by identifying challenges and opportunities, guiding solutions, and working with existing and new partners to design and test improvements to the systems that support research. Learn more and find out how you can participate.

PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Two recently accepted papers at npj Digital Medicine:

Our recent graduate Sihang Zeng’s internship paper with our former graduate Wilson Lau at Truveta:Zeng S, Young K, Lau W, Alipour E, Etzioni R, Yetisgen M, Oka A. 2026. TrajOnco: a multi-agent framework for temporal reasoning over longitudinal EHR for multi-cancer early detection. (Accepted for publication – npj Digital Medicine) Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10386‘

Our current graduate student Zhaoyi Sun co-authored a paper led by our former graduate Wen-wai Yim’s at Microsoft Health:Yim WW, Damm H, Pakull TMG, Preston S, Keyes T, Ellis-Caleo TJ, Sun Z, Yetisgen M, Codella N, Wei M, Bekheet F, Neal JW, Shah N, Eryılmaz B, Nensa F, Livingstone E, Friedrich CM, Lodde G. Challenges in AI Based Tumor Board Case Summarization and Recommendations. 2026. (Accepted for publication – npj Digital Medicine) Available at: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9916397/v1

COMMUNITY BUILDING

Greetings BIME faculty, staff, students, and trainees,

Please join us on Thursday, October 29th at The HUB from 3:00 to 6:00pm for an afternoon of bowling and pizza!

We’ve got food, drinks, and prizes, including one for best dressed! That’s a hint—since it’s Halloween weekend, costumes are highly encouraged.

RSVP to help us plan the perfect pizza lineup: RSVP here!

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Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit

The day will feature:

Opening remarks from University President Robert J. Jones, Ph.D.
Presentations from leading experts in neuroscience, medicine, engineering, ethics, and technology
Discussions on emerging discoveries and advances at the intersection of brain science and computation
Lightning talks from trainees
Opportunities to network with colleagues from across the university and beyond
A keynote address and closing panel discussion featuring Christopher Rozell, Ph.D., Julian T. Hightower Chair and Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/tEG38twVRi8AFMST7

We hope you will join us for a day of discovery, collaboration, and conversation as we work together to break barriers in neuroscience.

Best regards,
The Breaking Barriers in Neuroscience Summit Organizing Committee

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Community Connections In-Person Reception 2026
Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 4:30 PM until 7:30 PM
Intellectual House
4249 Little Canoe Channel Northeast
Seattle, WA 98105
United States

The Office of Graduate Student Equity & Excellence (GSEE) and the Office of Graduate Student Affairs (GSA) are thrilled to welcome our incoming and returning graduate students to the University of Washington!

Start the academic year off right with good people, good food, and good music for a great time!

Community Connections is an excellent opportunity for our students from diverse experiences and perspectives and first-generation grad students to build connection and community across disciplines. This is a welcoming space to meet peers, expand your network, and cultivate a sense of belonging.

The second half of Community Connections is our In-Person Reception for all new and returning graduate students. Come as you are.  Invite other graduate students from your department or come solo and enjoy the company of your fellow graduate community. There will be food, refreshments and music!

Doors open at 4:30 pm and the reception ends promptly at 7:30 pm.

Details and RSVP HERE

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This year’s rendition of Art Neureau is just around the corner! Time to get out the art supplies and exercise your creative muscles!

Art Neureau is an annual neuroscience-themed art show organized every year by students/staff associated with the neuroscience graduate program at the University of Washington. This year it will be held at the Fremont Abbey on Thursday, October 29.

Submissions will be accepted until THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22. Pieces do not have to be completed by this time; however, if you are intending to submit a piece, you should fill out this form by that deadline. Anyone can submit a piece — the only rule is that all artwork must be neuroscience-related in some way! (So please include how your piece accomplishes this in the description.) Depending upon the volume of submissions, acceptance may be limited, with preference given to new pieces (i.e. those not shown in previous years) and to pieces by those affiliated with UW Neuroscience.

If accepted, your artwork must be completed by the night of Art Neureau, THURSDAY OCTOBER 29. Artwork will need to be dropped off at UW campus, details TBD, or brought to the Fremont Abbey the night of the show. Any question about submission requirements or the exhibit in general can be directed to neubehart@gmail.com. If you’d like to contribute a musical performance to the event, please email us as well! We’d love to have you on stage.

Here’s to another year of awesome science-art fusion!

Thanks!
Team Art Neureau

You can submit your art bit.ly/artneureau26

October 12, 2026 – October 16, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Jared Erwin, PhD
Thursday, October 22^nd – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present In-Person

Title:
Can an LLM Find the Patients? FHIR Query Accuracy for Clinical Cohort Identification

Abstract:
Clinical research starts with finding the right patients, yet translating a plain-English cohort description into an executable FHIR query demands fluency in both query syntax and the clinical code systems (SNOMED CT, ICD-10, LOINC, RxNorm) in which patients are actually recorded. This talk presents an execution-based benchmark of 108 phenotypes, 72 derived from PheKB algorithms, that scores large language models not on the text of the queries they write but on the patient sets those queries return against a live FHIR server. Closed-book, frontier models reach only moderate accuracy (F1 0.56 to 0.63) and depend heavily on how expertly the request is phrased. Giving the model an agentic loop with server introspection and terminology lookup lifts accuracy and reduces the gap between naive and expert prompts. I first ran the tests on synthetic data and then repeated them using MIMIC-IV data, with a similar pattern of resutls. I will argue that cohort identification is fundamentally a code-coverage problem, explore why clinical codes are something LLMs cannot reliably memorize, and discuss what this means for building clinical data tools.

Presenter Bio:
Jared Erwin, PhD, is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft with over 20 years experience developing software in the healthcare field. He holds a PhD in Biomedical Informatics and is a Lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) at the University of Washington, where he teaches research methods. His current work focuses on the infrastructure that connects EHR data to AI systems: standards-based clinical data representation (HL7 FHIR), large language models, and agentic workflows that operate on clinical data.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Greetings BIME faculty, staff, students, and trainees,

Please join us on Thursday, October 29th at The HUB from 3:00 to 6:00pm for an afternoon of bowling and pizza!

We’ve got food, drinks, and prizes, including one for best dressed! That’s a hint—since it’s Halloween weekend, costumes are highly encouraged.

RSVP to help us plan the perfect pizza lineup: RSVP here!

PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Zeng S, Owens L, Liu LJ, Carlsson S, Fainberg JS, Laudone VP, Schoen MW, Garraway IP, Etzioni R. TrajSurv-mPC: Learning From Prostate-Specific Antigen Trajectories for Interpretable and Generalizable Survival Prediction in Metastatic Prostate Cancer. JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. 2026 Sep;10(3):e2500328.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

Community Connections In-Person Reception 2026
Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 4:30 PM until 7:30 PM
Intellectual House
4249 Little Canoe Channel Northeast
Seattle, WA 98105
United States

Start the academic year off right with good people, good food, and good music for a great time!

Doors open at 4:30 pm and the reception ends promptly at 7:30 pm.

Details and RSVP HERE

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This year’s rendition of Art Neureau is just around the corner! Time to get out the art supplies and exercise your creative muscles!

Here’s to another year of awesome science-art fusion!

Thanks!
Team Art Neureau

You can submit your art bit.ly/artneureau26

October 5, 2026 – October 9, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Dr Denis Newman-Griffis, PhD (they/them)
Thursday, October 15^th – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present In-person

Title:
Disability data justice and informatics: Unlocking, bridging, and enabling representative data with AI

Abstract:
Disability is an everyday experience, but social marginalization of people with disabilities is often reflected in data that fail to represent disabled identities and stories. The flexibility and modeling power of AI technologies can help unlock richer, more multidimensional disability-related data; equally, uncritical approaches to data and AI risk embedding structural ableism into digital decision making. This talk will unpack technical approaches and critical insights from a decade of research at the intersection of disability, data, and AI, and illustrate pathways towards more equitable data futures. I will illustrate the growing role of natural language processing methods to understand functional limitations and disability impacts, and argue for person-centred, multimodal approaches as the future of AI for human function and disability.

Presenter Bio:
Dr Denis Newman-Griffis is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and AI for Health Lead in the University of Sheffield Centre for Machine Intelligence. Their interdisciplinary research is advancing the cutting edge in responsible AI for the public sector, AI for function and disability, and responsible AI education. Dr Newman-Griffis is a British Academy Innovation Fellow, an Expert Exchange Fellow in the Department for Business, Science, Innovation and Trade, and a former Pre-Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellow in the NIH Clinical Center. Their research on domain-adapted language modeling for human function and disability was recognized with the American Medical Informatics Association Doctoral Dissertation Award.

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October 2026 UW Medical AI & Data Science Journal Club

Monday, October 12, 2026: 1:00pm Pacific Time

Presenter Asa Gilmore will discuss the paper: Position: Epistemic uncertainty estimation methods are fundamentally incomplete

Join us in person: F107, 750 Republican St, Seattle 98109
-or-
via Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92158637394?pwd=pi87aK9LVz5Jx7KTPgVq0SX7d2xNIL.1
Meeting ID: 921 5863 7394
Passcode: 424586

Bio: Asa is from Seattle, WA, and is currently a senior at the University of Washington studying Mathematics. Prior to working at the Computational Ophthalmology Lab, he spent three years at the UW Neuroinformatics Research and Development Group, where he worked on building software tools for various brain MRI analysis techniques and training a foundation model for anatomical brain MRI. He is currently working on doing survival analysis for Uveal melanoma from ultra widefield optos images.

The UW Medical AI & Data Science Journal Club is led by Acting Assistant Professor, Yue Wu, PhD, UW Medicine Computational Ophthalmology Lab. Our journal club is open to all who are interested, providing an opportunity to exchange ideas, ask questions, and critique scientific methods related to artificial intelligence and big data that support our collective goal of creating better health.

We meet 2nd Mondays, 1-2pm Pacific Time in person and via zoom. At each meeting, the presenter provides an overview of a paper they selected, providing their thoughts and interpretation, and then the presentation is followed by questions and discussion among participants.

We are seeking additional presenters for 2026-2027. If you are interested in presenting or would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact Yue Wu, PhD

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Please join us in congratulating Chak Charoensilpchai who successfully passed his final dissertation defense!

Title: mHealth Adoption and System Integration in Thailand’s Primary Care: A Sequential Mixed-Methods Study of Sor Or Nor Buddy

Abstract: Mobile health (mHealth) applications may strengthen primary care by supporting community-based documentation, patient follow up, clinical decision-making, and care coordination. Their value, however, depends on whether they fit frontline workers and connect with existing health information systems. When applications operate separately from local databases, hospital systems, and paper records, they can create additional technical, workflow, and administrative burdens for frontline workers.

This dissertation examines mHealth adoption and system integration in Thailand’s public primary care system through a three-stage mixed-methods study of the Ministry of Public Health-supported Sor Or Nor Buddy mHealth application.

First, a scoping review of 30 peer-reviewed studies of mHealth applications used by community health workers in low- and middle-income countries found that 29 studies lacked evidence of full interoperability within national health information systems

Second, a mixed-methods survey of 128 Thai primary care workers found that perceived usefulness, ease of use, social influence, and facilitating conditions were associated with intention to use Sor Or Nor Buddy, while participants also reported duplicate documentation, incomplete system integration, and administrative burden.

Third, qualitative in-depth interviews with 14 workers showed unreliable connectivity, repetitive data entry, reporting requirements, privacy concerns, and limited access to clinical information shaped their daily use.

Overall, findings show that app-level usability alone is insufficient for sustainable mHealth implementation. Effective digital transformation in primary care requires interoperable systems, reliable infrastructure, reduced documentation burden, appropriate data governance safeguards, and end-user participation in design and implementation. The dissertation proposes a human-centered design roadmap to strengthen mHealth development and implementation in Thailand and similar primary care settings.

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On December 9, ISB is hosting its Frontiers in Computational Biology Symposium focusing on AI, Multi-Omics, and the Future of Human Health. The program features researchers exploring how these rapidly advancing fields are shaping the future of human health. The full program, speaker lineup and registration information can be found at https://isbscience.org/events/frontiers-in-computational-biology.

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This year’s rendition of Art Neureau is just around the corner! Time to get out the art supplies and exercise your creative muscles!

Here’s to another year of awesome science-art fusion!

Thanks!
Team Art Neureau

You can submit your art bit.ly/artneureau26

PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Sydney P. Sharp, Tianmai M. Zhang, Douglas Taren, et al. Effectiveness of an Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) Case-Based Virtual Community of Practice Model on Patient Outcomes for the Management of Long COVID and Other Fatiguing Illnesses: A Randomized Control Trial. Accepted at Frontiers in Health Services. Abstract available at https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/health-services/articles/10.3389/frhs.2026.1912240/abstract

Feng Chen, Ritam Dutt, Aynaz Taheri, Alex Williams, Lost in the Request: How Communication Variation Disrupts Retrieval and Action in Email Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02627. Accepted by the Workshop on Evaluation of Interactive Agents (IAEval) @ NeurIPS 2026.

Li LX, Bleker C, Soliman S, Calzone L, Hiroi N, Helikar T, Konig M, Ladeira L, Noel V, Salazar A, Safranek D, Theiffry D, Tsirvouli E, Niarkis A, & Gennari JH (in press). TabularQual: A spreadsheet-based format for annotating and curating logical models in SBML-qual. NPJ Systems Biology and Applications

COMMUNITY BUILDING
Bioscience Careers Seminar Series

The Bioscience Careers Seminar Series is back by popular demand! Now led by the PhD Ambassadors in collaboration with the Office of Research and Graduate Education and Life Science Washington, the series will allow graduate students to explore careers and build professional connections with biotech and pharmaceutical companies within Washington state. PhD training prepares you for many different jobs, both inside and outside the academy. During this year’s Bioscience Careers Seminar Series, we’ll highlight experiences of scientists who’ve transitioned from their PhD to various careers in one of our local companies.

Next session

Speaker: Ellen Kuwana, Kuwana Consulting
Date: October 21, 4-5pm
Location:: SLU Orin Smith Auditorium, 850 Republican Street

September 28, 2026 – October 2, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
No BIME 590 on October 8^th, next session October 15^th

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October 2026 UW Medical AI & Data Science Journal Club

Monday, October 12, 2026: 1:00pm Pacific Time

Presenter Asa Gilmore will discuss the paper: Position: Epistemic uncertainty estimation methods are fundamentally incomplete

Join us in person: F107, 750 Republican St, Seattle 98109
-or-
via Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92158637394?pwd=pi87aK9LVz5Jx7KTPgVq0SX7d2xNIL.1
Meeting ID: 921 5863 7394
Passcode: 424586

Bio: Asa is from Seattle, WA, and is currently a senior at the University of Washington studying Mathematics. Prior to working at the Computational Ophthalmology Lab, he spent three years at the UW Neuroinformatics Research and Development Group, where he worked on building software tools for various brain MRI analysis techniques and training a foundation model for anatomical brain MRI. He is currently working on doing survival analysis for Uveal melanoma from ultra widefield optos images.

We are seeking additional presenters for 2026-2027. If you are interested in presenting or would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact Yue Wu, PhD

UPCOMING EXAMS

Final Exam
Title: mHealth Adoption and System Integration in Thailand’s Primary Care: A Sequential Mixed-Methods Study of Sor Or Nor Buddy
Student: Chak Charoensilpchai
Date/Time: Tuesday, October 6, 8-10am PT
In-Person Location: HSEB – Health Sciences Education Building, HSEB 426
Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99323566318

PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Tianmai M Zhang, Hoda Shajari, Amr Hendy, et al. Failure Broadens, Success Sharpens: Continual Adaptation of Tool-Use Agents Across Diverse Tasks with Dual-Polarity Memory. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026 Workshop: Towards Test-Time Continual Learning Agents.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

U DISTRICT CHOW DOWN & STREET PARTY

Join U District restaurants on Saturday, October 3, 2026 for the sixth annual food walk and street party to sample from restaurants with $6 bites across the neighborhood. This event is produced by The U District Partnership who brings together local eateries, entertainers, and businesses to create a fun day with live music in the U District.

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KEMi Inaugural Symposium

Please join us for the inaugural KEMi symposium, bringing together faculty, students, industry partners, and leadership from across academia, healthcare, and the broader Pacific Northwest community. This collaboration between the UW School of Medicine and the UW College of Engineering advances engineering-based approaches to medicine, with the ambition of changing how disease is detected, treated, and prevented.

Event Details and RSVP HERE

September 21, 2026 – September 25, 2026

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, MD, FACMI
Thursday, October 1^st – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present In-Person

Title:
2026 BIME Vision, History, Strategic Plan and Praxis

Abstract:
The presentation will provide an overview of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education through the lens of the current strategic plan. The overview will include vision, history and evolution looking at the synergy between research, education and practice (praxis) as well as the synergy between practice, applied research and foundational research. Within each area (research, praxis, education) current activities and future plans will be reviewed.

Presenter Bio:
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch has 45 years of experience in computer science, over 40 years in biomedical informatics and over 20 years in clinical medicine (pediatrics and neonatology). He has been at the University of Washington since 1992, serving as Head of the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics since 2001 and serving as Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education since 2011. He has served in a variety of operational leadership roles in UW Medicine IT Services since 1992 in the analytics, research, and clinical computing domains, including Chief of Research and Data Integration (2005-15), Chief Data Officer (2022-2026), and Chief Research Information Officer (2024-26). He has played a leadership role in the creation and evolution of the BIME educational programs (undergraduate (joint with iSchool), MS/PhD, postdoctoral, applied clinical informatics MS (CIPCT) joint with Nursing, Clinical Informatics Fellowship joint with Family Medicine). He has led a number of key initiatives in informatics practice (praxis) including the areas of telemedicine, digital library, electronic medical records, data warehousing, analytics, clinical research informatics). His unifying theme of research over the last three decades has been data integration of multimodal electronic biomedical data (clinical, genomic and other data) both for a) knowledge discovery and b) in order to integrate this knowledge with clinical data at the point of care for decision support. His current research focuses on a) secondary use of electronic medical record (EMR) for translational research including outcomes research, learning healthcare systems, patient accrual based on complex phenotypic eligibility criteria, b) the use of EMR systems for cross institutional comparative effectiveness research, and c) integration of genomic data into the EMR for clinical decision support.

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October 2026 UW Medical AI & Data Science Journal Club

Monday, October 12, 2026: 1:00pm Pacific Time

Presenter Asa Gilmore will discuss the paper: Position: Epistemic uncertainty estimation methods are fundamentally incomplete

Join us in person: F107, 750 Republican St, Seattle 98109
-or-
via Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92158637394?pwd=pi87aK9LVz5Jx7KTPgVq0SX7d2xNIL.1
Meeting ID: 921 5863 7394
Passcode: 424586

We are seeking additional presenters for 2026-2027. If you are interested in presenting or would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact Yue Wu, PhD

UPCOMING EXAMS

COMMUNITY BUILDING

BIME Welcome Reception

We hope you can make it to this year’s annual BIME reception to welcome everyone back and welcome our incoming students, postdocs, and fellows! Refreshments will be served.

When: Tuesday, September 29^th from 4:30-6:00 PM

Where: SLU Building C, 1st floor Key Bank Lounge (behind parking ticket kiosk and parking lot elevators)

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Fall 2026 International Graduate Student Welcome Mixer
Date: Friday, October 9, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Location: Husky Union Building (HUB), Room Lyceum, UW Seattle Campus
Address: 4001 E. Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA 98195

Calling all new and returning international master’s and doctoral students! Join us for an afternoon of connection, community, food, games, and prizes while meeting fellow Huskies and exploring valuable campus resources.

During this two-hour mixer, you’ll have the chance to:

Discover campus resources designed to support international graduate students.
Network with peers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
Enjoy food, games, and prizes in a welcoming and festive atmosphere.

RSVP is required: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/Xn3xAEV8bV.

News and Events

Chair’s Message

New Global Rankings for UW

Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter

November 2, 2026 – November 6, 2026

October 26, 2026 – October 30, 2026

October 12, 2026 – October 16, 2026

October 5, 2026 – October 9, 2026

September 28, 2026 – October 2, 2026

September 21, 2026 – September 25, 2026

Upcoming Events