Our Faculty

Allan Walkey, MD, MSc
Division Chief, Health Systems Science

Research focus: 

• Sepsis
• Acute lung injury
• Atrial Fibrillation occurring during critical illness

Stephen Erban, MD
Section Chief, Clinical Informatics

Research focus: 

• Using the electronic health record to improve quality of care
• Improving reconciliation of medications and allergies
• Patient and provider engagement using patient portals
• Telehealth and remote patient monitoring

Mitchell Gitkind, MD
Interim Advisor, Health Systems Science Education and Quality Scholarship

Focus areas: 

• Development and delivery of HSS curricular material for medical students
• Quality improvement and patient safety training for students, residents, and faculty
• Assessment of learner competency in HSS

Varun Ayyaswami, MD

Research focus: 

• Adult Primary and Preventive Care
• Cholesterol
• Chronic Disease Management
• Hyperlipidemia
• Hypertension

Elena Byhoff, MD, MSc

Research focus: 

• Screening for social needs in clinical settings
• Implementation of health care and community organization partnerships
• Stakeholder engagement methods

Mara Meyer Epstein, ScD

Research focus: 

• Cancer Epidemiology, Screening, and Survival
• Use of databases derived from electronic health records and health claims for population-based cancer research
• Hematological cancers and precursor conditions
  

Kimberly A. Fisher, MD, MSc

Research focus: 

• Communication in healthcare
• Clinical practice guideline implementation
• Patient safety and quality improvement

Mayuko Ito Fukunaga, MD, MSc

Research focus: 

• Health informatics
• Lung cancer and lung cancer screening
• Shared decision making
• Technology-assisted implementation

Jerry H. Gurwitz, MD

Research focus: 

• Improving the health and healthcare of older adult populations
• Advancing the science of multiple chronic conditions
• Improving medication safety in older adults
• Deprescribing potentially inappropriate medications in older adults 

Kouta Ito, MD, MS

Research focus: 

• Decision analysis
• Cost-effectiveness analysis

Alok Kapoor, MD, MSc

Research focus:  

• Anticoagulation use and underuse, especially in patients from underserved populations
• Medication safety
• Transitions of care
• Clinical decision support tools to improve care for patients with cardiovascular disease 

Honghuang Lin, PhD
Clinical Informatics Section

Research focus:  

• Bioinformatics analysis of multi-omics data
• Statistical genetic study of complex diseases
• Exploration of wearable technologies for health monitoring
• Development of machine learning models for early disease diagnosis

Kathleen Mazor, EdD

Research focus: 

• Provider-patient communication
• Health literacy
• Patients' perspectives and experiences with healthcare
• Measure development and survey design

Sonal Singh, MD, MPH

Research focus: 

• Drug safety
• Evidence synthesis
• Shared decision making

David Smelson, PsyD

Research focus: 

• Community-based treatment for addiction and mental health
• Treatment development
• Adapting treatment for special populations
• Large-scale implementation trials

Apurv Soni, MD, PhD
Clinical Informatics Section

Research focus: 

• Risk prediction and stratification models
• Digital site-less trials and implementation science
• Pragmatic trials and health equity

Mayra S. Tisminetzky, MD, PhD, MPH

Research focus:

• Epidemiology of aging
• Multiple chronic conditions/multimorbidity: Epidemiology and measurement
• Best approaches to measuring frailty using electronic medical records
• Epidemiology of cardiovascular disease

Biqi (Becky) Wang, PhD
Clinical Informatics Section

Research focus: 

• Statistical genetics
• Genetic epidemiology
• Multilevel data integration
• Machine learning and disease diagnosis