News and Events
Chair’s Message
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 have recently added a specialization in Data Science. We are completing a curriculum revision for our on line applied clinical informatics MS which will be effective Fall 2020. The work of our fellows in the clinical informatics fellowship program has received plaudits from clinical administrators and faculty, and we are currently recruiting a new faculty member in our department to assist with this program (view position description). We are also recruiting a faculty member in medical education to start Summer 2020 (view position description). This is 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
The University of Washington Welcomes New Chief Research Information Officer
The University of Washington is delighted to announce Dr. Shawn Murphy, MD, PhD will be joining the University of Washington as a core faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) with a joint appointment in Neurology. In addition to being a core BIME faculty member and attending in an outpatient neurology clinic, he will be serving as UW Medicine Chief Research Information Officer in IT Services, informatics lead of the Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Data Science Core, and the Director of the Institute for Medical Data Sciences (IMDS).
“I am honored and excited to join the Data Science workforce at the University of Washington. I have always admired the closeness UW students have to the top teachers in the tech industry. I am hoping to enable Clinical and Informatics Research to use this and take Data Science and AI to a new level at UW,” said Dr. Murphy.
Dr. Murphy is currently the Chief Research Information Officer at Mass General Brigham and a Professor of Neurology. Over the past 30 years, he has been an integral leader and innovator in supporting research data and technology there. He is the creator of the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) and co-founded i2b2 (used in > 300 sites globally) enabling scalable, audit-ready clinical data access for the research community nationally and internationally. Shawn has also been a leading scientific collaborator and principal investigator on numerous multi-institutional NIH grants, including RECOVER, eMerge, ACT, AoU, PCORI, SHRINE and other major award programs that helped elevate MGB into a leader in translational informatics. His work has shaped standards for privacy-preserving data sharing, cohort discovery tools, and clinical data harmonization, influencing research data operations across Mass General Brigham hospitals and enabling thousands of studies per year.
“We are delighted to have Dr. Murphy join UW, bringing decades of expertise in informatics and data science research and operational work around instrumenting the health care enterprise for discovery in the course of clinical care,” said Dr. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, Chair of BIME and Interim Director for IMDS.
“ITHS welcomes Dr. Murphy to this crucial role. He is exactly the right person to take on the new informatics challenges of clinical and translational research,” said Dr. John Amory, Principal Investigator of ITHS and Associate Dean of Translational Sciences.
Dr. Murphy will be bringing this rich and deep expertise to his UW roles as BIME faculty, Neurology faculty, UW Medicine CRIO, ITHS informatics lead and Institute for Medical Data Science Director.
“I am excited to welcome Dr. Murphy to UW Medicine and confident that his decades of leadership in research informatics at Mass General Brigham will significantly advance our research, data science, and innovation efforts,” said Eric Neil, UW Medicine Chief Information Officer.
Dr. Murphy’s position begins effective February 1, 2026.
Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter
January 19, 2026 – January 23, 2026
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: John Meddar, PhD, MSc
Thursday, January 29th – 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: Patterns of Telemedicine Use and Associations with Uncontrolled Hypertension among Racial and Ethnic Minorities
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic spurred ubiquitous adoption and use of telemedicine, including in one of its promising sub-branches, remote patient monitoring (RPM). This talk explores differential telemedicine use patterns among racial and ethnic minorities in the US during the pandemic and the relationship between RPM utilization frequency and hypertension control.
Telemedicine relates to the use of information and telecommunication technologies for remote provision of care, often with the use of videoconferencing technologies. Similarly, RPM utilizes specialized information and telecommunication technologies to monitor chronic illnesses and transmit physiologic measurements to providers’ electronic health records (EHR). Telemedicine, broadly, has been shown to expand access to healthcare, enhance patient-clinician communication and improve patients’ participatory engagement with healthcare delivery processes. RPM has shown strong potential to improve hypertension treatment and control rates by providing real-time longitudinal care and by fostering programs tailor-fitted to particular clinical contexts and patient population subgroups.
We will explore patterns of telemedicine use across diverse minority populations and compare video-based visits to other relevant visit modalities. We’ll also assess utilization dynamics across varied clinical specialties and geographical contexts. Additionally, we will explore generalized patterns of RPM use across distinct healthcare utilization metrics among a metropolitan-dwelling hypertensive patient cohort and their associations with uncontrolled hypertension and quantify whether the relationship between frequency of use and uncontrolled hypertension vary according to race and ethnicity.
Speaker Bio:
John Meddar is a postdoctoral scholar-fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education. His research focus rests principally, though not exclusively, at the forefronts of digital health utilization, digital equity and social determinants of health. John earned his PhD from New York University in population health, his master’s degree from Cornell University in health informatics and a bachelor’s degree from New York City College of Technology in biomedical informatics. His primary research goals are to elucidate and characterize evolving patterns of technology use within and across the healthcare delivery system, interrogating gaps in access and utilization among patient groups disproportionately impacted by digital health inequities in the era of digital medicine. John’s research also aims to investigate and improve the mechanistic processes by which social determinants of health are adequately integrated and adjudicated at the health system level.
PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
- Dorosan M, Chen YL, He Y, Zhuang Q, Lam SWS
In silico evaluation of algorithm-based clinical decision support systems based on care pathway simulation models: A scoping review
JMIR AI. 18/01/2026:72472 (forthcoming/in press)
DOI: 10.2196/72472
URL: https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/72472
This paper reviews simulation strategies for representing care pathways (e.g., ABM, DES), examining modeling choices, parameterization, and research gaps.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Greetings everyone – please join us for the winter BIME social hour on January 29th, 4-5pm at the SLU Lounge. We’ll have snacks and mocktails and play Bingo!
January 12, 2026 – January 16, 2026
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Justin Guinney, PhD
Thursday, January 22nd – 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: Clinical Insights and Applications in Oncology using a Large Real-World Database
Abstract:
The rapid expansion of new drug modalities, diagnostic capabilities, and analytic approaches has ushered in a new paradigm for precision oncology using large multi-modal datasets and AI. This talk will introduce the institutional agreement recently put in place between Tempus AI and UW that can enable impactful and strategic collaborations using Tempus’ large real-world database. Multiple science vignettes – spanning a variety of data modalities and analytical methodologies – will be presented as examples of the clinical and translational questions that Tempus data can best support.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Justin Guinney is the Senior Vice President of Computational Biology and Cancer Genomics at Tempus AI, where he leads research and development of precision oncology models using Tempus’ large multimodal database. Prior to Tempus, Dr. Guinney was the Vice President of Computational Oncology and principal investigator at the non-profit research institute Sage Bionetworks, where his lab focused on the development of diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive models of disease. Dr. Guinney retains positions as an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington, and Director of the DREAM Challenges. In this latter role, Dr Guinney organized data and AI challenges for benchmarking methods in biomedicine and bioinformatics. Dr Guinney received a BA in history & pre-medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD in computational biology and bioinformatics from Duke University.
PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
- Oliver: “A paper I wrote with some colleagues was highlighted in the American Scientist!”
Finding Humanity in Health Data | American Scientist
Bear Don’t Walk OJ, Paullada A, Everhart A, Casanova-Perez R, Cohen T, Veinot T (2024) Opportunities for incorporating intersectionality into biomedical informatics. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 154:104653 - Conference abstract publications:
Huang, M.J. Falvo, B.W. Richmond, S.E. Hines, A.M. Sotolongo, T. Alexander, S.D. Krefft, D.R. Glick, G. Luo, J.J. Osterholzer, M. Arjomandi, and Post-Deployment Cardiopulmonary Evaluation Network. Distinct Exposure Profiles May Underlie Asthma in Post-deployment Veterans: Findings from a National Cohort of Deployed Veterans. American Thoracic Society (ATS) International Conference (ATS’26), Orlando, FL, May 2026. - Zeng, M.J. Falvo, T. Alexander, N. Jani, G. Luo, M. Arjomandi, and S. E. Hines. Potential Burden of Pulmonary Disability among a National Cohort of Deployed Veterans. American Thoracic Society (ATS) International Conference (ATS’26), Orlando, FL, May 2026.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Bryant thomas Karras MD FACMI (bkarras@uw.edu and Bryant.Karras@doh.wa.gov) CMIO of the WA State dept of HEALTH, a former faculty and now Clinical Faculty of the UW School of Public Health HSPop has been appointed for an additional three-year on the HHS, Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC), beginning January 1, 2026. The 21 Century Cures Act established HITAC to provide recommendations to the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on policies, standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria relating to health information technology that advances the electronic access, exchange, and use of health information in the US. This Federal Advisory Committee’s efforts help the HHS ASTP/ONC address challenges related to health information technology. https://www.healthit.gov/hitac/committees/health-information-technology-advisory-committee-hitac/membership
Bryant has also been asked to wear another hat; serving alongside other leaders on the Executive Advisory Committee for the newly launched Washington Alliance for Health Data Exchange (WAHDX).
WAHDX was intentionally designed to be use-case driven, grounded in governance, and shaped by community input. This work reflects a shared belief that Washington can do better when we work together. WAHDX creates a shared, trusted infrastructure so organizations across sectors can collaborate on what really matters – better outcomes. Website: https://wahdx.org/
January 5, 2026 – January 9, 2026
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Favour Nerrise, PhD Candidate
Thursday, January 15th – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present via Zoom
Title: Discovering Digital Biomarkers for Detecting and Monitoring Neurodegenerative Diseases
Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases are traditionally evaluated using clinical assessments, neuroimaging, and molecular biomarkers that are costly, episodic, and often insensitive to early or subtle functional changes. While these biomarkers have advanced diagnosis and staging, they provide limited resolution for continuous detection and longitudinal monitoring.
In this talk, I will discuss the emerging role of digital biomarkers derived from wearables, video, and passive sensing technologies as complementary tools for neurodegenerative disease research. I will first contrast traditional biomarkers with digital measures that enable earlier detection through objective, high-frequency characterization of movement and physiological function. I will then focus on digital biomarkers for monitoring, highlighting how longitudinal, multimodal data can capture disease progression and day-to-day variability that are difficult to assess in the clinic.
Together, these approaches illustrate how digital biomarkers can augment existing clinical and biological measures to support earlier detection, more sensitive monitoring, and patient-centered assessment of neurodegenerative disease.
Speaker Bio: Favour is a 5th year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering conducting research in the Stanford Translational AI Lab with Dr. Ehsan Adeli and Dr. Kilian Pohl. Her work is supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford HAI Graduate Fellowship, and Stanford Wu Tsai Institute NeuroTech Training Program Fellowship. Previously, she obtained a B.S. in Computer Science with minors in Arabic and Global Engineering Leadership from the University of Maryland-College Park (Go Terps!). Her current research is focused on using AI-driven methods to discover trackable, digital biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases by identifying neural correlates between neuroimaging and recorded human, movement, or sleep-related disturbances. Ultimately, this work would improve monitoring the progression and digital phenotyping of neurodegenerative diseases of aging. Outside of the lab, Favour loves teaching, traveling, cooking, and watching/playing sports.
PAPERS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
- S. Zeng, S.S. Coggeshall, E.W. Rosser, S.L. Taylor, D.J. Burgess, G. Luo, and S.B. Zeliadt. The Role of Whole Health in Enhancing Tobacco Cessation Outcomes for Veterans: A Retrospective Cohort Study. Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM).
December 29, 2025 – January 2, 2026
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590
Presenter: Ari Pollack, MD, MS
Thursday, January 8th – 11-11:50 am
850 Republican Street, Building C, Room 123 A/B
Zoom Information: https://washington.zoom.us/my/bime590
Speaker will present via Zoom
Title: Supporting Collaborative Decision Making in Pediatric Chronic Kidney Disease
Abstract: Youth with chronic kidney disease (CKD) face critical challenges as they transition toward independent self-management, yet they rarely have opportunities to participate meaningfully in health-related decisions. Collaborative decision-making (CDM)—where patients, caregivers, and clinicians work together to make informed, values-aligned choices—offers a promising approach, but little is known about how to support CDM in pediatric chronic care, especially pediatric nephrology. This talk presents findings from Kids CoLab, a NIH funded, multi-site mixed-methods study examining CDM in pediatric nephrology. Drawing on clinic observations, stakeholder interviews, a national survey, and co-design workshops, I will describe the current state of decision-making in pediatric nephrology care, characterizing the extent of clinician-driven processes and the limited elicitation of patient and family values. I will then present what stakeholders prioritize—including triadic collaboration and quality-of-life considerations—and propose design principles for technologies that support shared situational awareness across the patient-caregiver-clinician triad. This work offers a framework for designing collaborative decision-making tools applicable to pediatric chronic care and beyond.
Speaker Bio: Ari Pollack is a pediatric nephrologist and clinical informaticist at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington, where he directs the Pediatric Nephrology Fellowship Program and leads the Health Informatics and Visual Experience (HIVE) Lab. He holds appointments in the Department of Pediatrics, the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, and the Information School. His research focuses on supporting clinical decision-making for both patients and clinicians, using participatory design and mixed-methods approaches to develop tools that facilitate collaborative healthcare decisions. He is board certified in both pediatric nephrology and clinical informatics.
December 15, 2025 – December 19, 2025
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590 – On break until January 8th!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
The University of Washington Welcomes New Chief Research Information Officer
The University of Washington is delighted to announce Dr. Shawn Murphy, MD, PhD will be joining the University of Washington as a core faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) with a joint appointment in Neurology. In addition to being a core BIME faculty member and attending in an outpatient neurology clinic, he will be serving as UW Medicine Chief Research Information Officer in IT Services, informatics lead of the Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Data Science Core, and the Director of the Institute for Medical Data Sciences (IMDS).
“I am honored and excited to join the Data Science workforce at the University of Washington. I have always admired the closeness UW students have to the top teachers in the tech industry. I am hoping to enable Clinical and Informatics Research to use this and take Data Science and AI to a new level at UW,” said Dr. Murphy.
Dr. Murphy is currently the Chief Research Information Officer at Mass General Brigham and a Professor of Neurology. Over the past 30 years, he has been an integral leader and innovator in supporting research data and technology there. He is the creator of the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) and co-founded i2b2 (used in > 300 sites globally) enabling scalable, audit-ready clinical data access for the research community nationally and internationally. Shawn has also been a leading scientific collaborator and principal investigator on numerous multi-institutional NIH grants, including RECOVER, eMerge, ACT, AoU, PCORI, SHRINE and other major award programs that helped elevate MGB into a leader in translational informatics. His work has shaped standards for privacy-preserving data sharing, cohort discovery tools, and clinical data harmonization, influencing research data operations across Mass General Brigham hospitals and enabling thousands of studies per year.
“We are delighted to have Dr. Murphy join UW, bringing decades of expertise in informatics and data science research and operational work around instrumenting the health care enterprise for discovery in the course of clinical care,” said Dr. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, Chair of BIME and Interim Director for IMDS.
“ITHS welcomes Dr. Murphy to this crucial role. He is exactly the right person to take on the new informatics challenges of clinical and translational research,” said Dr. John Amory, Principal Investigator of ITHS and Associate Dean of Translational Sciences.
Dr. Murphy will be bringing this rich and deep expertise to his UW roles as BIME faculty, Neurology faculty, UW Medicine CRIO, ITHS informatics lead and Institute for Medical Data Science Director.
“I am excited to welcome Dr. Murphy to UW Medicine and confident that his decades of leadership in research informatics at Mass General Brigham will significantly advance our research, data science, and innovation efforts,” said Eric Neil, UW Medicine Chief Information Officer.
Dr. Murphy’s position begins effective February 1, 2026.
_________________________
Please join us in congratulating George Wu who successfully passed his PhD Defense!
Title: Comprehensive assessment and quantification of incoherent speech using natural language processing
Abstract: Coherence is a linguistic feature that is defined as the orderly and interconnected flow of ideas. The disruption of coherence is a linguistic anomaly that is commonly observed in a group of psychiatric disorders known as schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), where disorganized thoughts manifest as incoherent speech. While early detection of symptoms can potentially lead to better outcomes, manual assessment of symptom severity can be time-consuming and require specialized expertise. Therefore, symptom evaluation through automated coherence assessment methods is desired.
However, gaps remain in prior research on this area, namely, 1) most prior work focuses on the estimation of local coherence (coherent transitions between adjacent semantic units) via computation of cosine values between vector representations of sequential semantic units. The estimation of global coherence (sustaining a theme or topic throughout a narrative) has received much less attention; 2) the impact of automated speech recognition (ASR) errors receives little attention. Prior work mainly focused on using manual transcript data; 3) there is limited exploration on using language model perplexity to assess coherence, especially given the recent advancement of large language models (LLM).
This work bridges the gaps through the following contributions: 1) Two new global coherence assessment methods were developed based on centroids of embeddings (vector representation of semantic space). We found that the global coherence methods align better with human judgment than local coherence methods. 2) A time-series feature extraction pipeline is used to replace the aggregation step in coherence assessment pipelines. We found that by using this method, coherence evaluation process is resistant to the impact of ASR errors in the text input. 3) Two sentence-level perplexity-based coherence methods were developed, and we revealed that combining perplexity features with traditional coherence scores (proximity features because they are based on cosine similarity) resulting in better prediction models than using proximity or perplexity features alone. 4) The innovations and classical approaches were combined into the Comprehensive Coherence Calculator (CCC), a software package that can perform comprehensive coherence analysis with a myriad of configurations. With these contributions, a fully automated coherence assessment pipeline can be established to offer patients easy monitoring at home, clinicians the necessary information to provide better care, and researchers an objective quantitative basis for the study of semantic coherence.