BMIR Staff

Research Scientist

Alison Callahan is a research scientist in the Center for Biomedical Informatics and a member of the Shah Lab. Her work involves research and development of informatics methods for the analysis of biomedical and clinical data, to derive insights and support data-driven decision making by clinicians and patients.

Research Interests: Electronic medical records, data science, machine learning, observational data analysis, clinical decision support

Research Biostatistician

My research focuses on establishing novel strategies to assess and improve quality of health care delivery system with data science techniques using patient reported outcomes (PROs) and Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

Research Interests: Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Biomedical Informatics, Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), Machine learning, Deep learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Software Engineer

Michael is a highly skilled software architect with over 20 years of experience designing and developing complex applications. As the Chief Software Architect for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), Michael oversees BioPortal, a set of online solutions enabling biomedical researchers to work with disparate ontological resources.

Research Interests: Ontologies, Big Data, Scalable Architecture

Research Scientist

Obtaining large-scale, expert-labeled training data is a significant challenge in medicine, making it difficult to take advantage of state-of-the-art machine learning tools. My research explores weakly supervised machine learning, where expert rules, knowledge bases, and other noisy label sources are combined to automatically create training data.

Research Interests: weak supervision, natural language processing, medical imaging

Research Data Analyst

Fatima Gowher is a first-generation college graduate from California State University, East Bay with her Bachelors in Computer Science and will be starting her Masters in Data Science at Northwestern University in January 2022.Her background and expertise are in the field of Computer Science and Data Science. In her previous work, Fatima has contributed to projects with the Department of Homeland Security, TSA and the Department of Energy at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. She also serves as a Data Science volunteer at a non-profit organization called LATech4Good in Los Angeles, California where she leads the Immigrants and Refugee committee that works to provide equitable access to data and technology in underserved communities.

Research interests: Using AI models, specifically NLP, to promote data and health equity.

Technical Program Manager

I provide project management, coordination, and outreach for the CEDAR and BioPortal projects. I offer technical support for product management and systems architecture, and I support operations, financial analysis, and fundraising roles as needed.

Research Interests: Creating new solutions for metadata and semantic challenges: Informatics, Interoperability.

Software Engineer

Josef Hardi, a seasoned software engineer who has been expanding what is possible with code in order to make life more efficient and he joined Musen Lab to fulfill that vision. Josef has been in the software development business for over ten years in a niche area called the Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation. Josef converts caffeine to code.

Research Interests: Semantic Web, Graph Database, Code Optimization, Blockchain

Software Engineer

Software Engineer

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Technology, Ontology Engineering, Metadata, Knowledge Graphs

Project Manager

Nilpa Shah is a Program Manager at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Her background and expertise are in studying the impacts of sociocultural and biobehavioral determinants of health. Prior to joining Stanford University, she managed multiple research programs at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of California, Davis where she worked in the fields of family caregiving, pain management and telementoring, patient-provider decision making in cancer treatment, and violence prevention.

Research Interest:  Improving healthcare equity, patient outcomes, and healthcare access and delivery for marginalized communities.

Research Scientist

Experienced Senior Clinical Scientist with a demonstrated history of working in Academia. Skilled in Health Informatics, Artificial Intelligence and, Natural Language Processing.

Research Interests: Clinical Natural Language Processing, AI in Medicine, Observational Studies, EHR Data Quality

Research Assistant

My work involves managing and analyzing large clinical data sets derived from electronic health records (EHRs) to assess and improve the quality of medical decision making (MDM) and, in-turn, patient reported outcomes (PROs). 

Research Interests: Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Biomedical Informatics, Data Science, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, AI in Medicine, Biostatistics, Medical Decision Making (MDM) 

Information Systems Analyst

Software Engineer

Jennifer is a senior software engineer with 20 years work experience on open source projects for building, visualizing, and interacting with ontologies. Outside of work, she enjoys lap swimming with the Stanford Masters team.

Postdoctoral Scholar – Khatri Lab

Postdoctoral Scholar – Gentles Lab

Research Interests: Computational biology, bioinformatics, cancer, immunity

Postdoctoral Scholar – Khatri Lab

Postdoctoral Scholar – Khatri Lab

I am a New York native and have lived in Miami, Philadelphia, and LA. My love for pediatric critical care medicine brought me to Stanford, where I completed my clinical training in 2019. I have since started a postdoc as a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Physician-Scientist Scholar in the Khatri Lab while practicing medicine as a Pediatric Intensivist.

Research Interests: Computational integration of heterogeneous clinical and transcriptomic data to decipher the host response's role in life-threatening manifestations of immune dysregulation in critical illness.

Postdoctoral Scholar – Gevaert Lab

I obtained a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016. I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford with Prof. Weissman and Prof. Ozgur in 2017. Since January 2018, I have been working with Prof. Olivier Gevaert at BMIR in the Stanford School of Medicine.

Research Interests: Machine learning, medical imaging, electronic health records, statistics, information theory

Postdoctoral Scholar –  Gevaert Lab

Heather is a post-doctoral BD-STEP fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) and the Palo Alto VA working with both Dr. Olivier Gevaert and Dr. Rajesh Shah. While her PhD research focus was in genomics, her post-doctoral research focus is in radiomics, ultimately aiming to combine both radiomics and genomics.

Interests: Reading novels, writing fiction, and running outside.

Postdoctoral Scholar - Khatri Lab

Research Interests: Genetics and genomics, Cancer, Multi-omics data integration, Viruses, Data visualization, Precision medicine

Postdoctoral Scholar – Boussard Lab

Behzad Naderalvojoud received his PhD degree in Computer Science at Hacettepe University, Turkey.  He has led many industrial AI projects in the fields of healthcare intelligence and information management in the Eureka cluster programmes.

Research Interests: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Big Data Analytics, Healthcare Intelligence, Healthcare Knowledge Discovery

Postdoctoral Scholar – Boussard Lab

Rebecca Staiger received her PhD in Health Policy & Management at Yale University.  Her research combines approaches from healthcare economics, health policy, and health services research to better understand how patients and physicians work individually and together to produce health outcomes. In her ongoing work, she uses the Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) files to explore the role of the physician-patient relationship in coproducing health among Medicaid managed care enrollees.

Research Interests: Healthcare Economics, Healthcare Policy