Health Sciences Informatics Training Program

2009

Eric Chow (MS Research)

Eric received his BASc from the University of Toronto in Canada in Industrial Engineering specializing in healthcare systems engineering. His research work at a major trauma center in Toronto has focused primarily on clinical process optimization through the application of genetic algorithms and simulation in the operating rooms. Later, Eric went to the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom to pursue his MSc in Decision Sciences where he consulted to the NHS while working with a healthcare transformation firm.

Eric's research interests are focused on the application of optimization and artificial intelligence to support real-time resource allocation decisions in healthcare, ultimately with the goal of improving safety, access and quality of care for patients. In his free time, he enjoys mountain climbing and cycling.

Hon Weng Chong, Visiting Scholar, University of Melbourne

Hon Weng Chong is a third year medical student from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Hon is a hobbyist programmer, gadget geek and video game enthusiast. His current field of interest is in the therapeutic use of online video games in pediatrics and is currently involved with the projectHOPE initiative at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Being a hobbyist programmer Hon develops iPhone and Web applications in his spare time. He is experienced in PHP, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C and Objective-C programming languages.

Kyle Dunn (NLM Fellow Research)

Kyle Dunn is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Mr. Dunn is establishing a career at the intersection of science, technology and health policy.  While supporting contracts for the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Dunn studied modern biosurveillance systems, incident response communication tools, and GIS-based infectious disease mapping and modeling programs.  In 2008, he joined the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association in Chicago, IL, where he investigated physician attitudes towards personal health records and the potential pitfalls for PHR-centered public health reporting.  The focus of Mr. Dunn’s doctoral research is environmental health policy—notably the advancement of risk assessment strategies through public health informatics.  He is honored to participate in the National Library of Medicine training program, and recognizes NLM’s contributions to environmental health science.  (NLM’s 1967 Toxicology Information Program pre-dated even the Environmental Protection Agency!)  Mr. Dunn received a B.S. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from Yale College and an M.H.S. in Health Policy fromJohns Hopkins University.

Olga Joos (NLM Fellow Research)

Olga Joos, DrPH Student, Department of International Health; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Olga is a first year DrPH student in the Department of International Health and National Library of Medicine pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of Health Science Informatics. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in Psychology before serving as a health education volunteer for the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa. She returned to Georgetown to pursue an accelerated degree in Nursing and Certificate in International Health. She worked as a pediatric critical care nurse in the United States and returned to West Africa to work as a clinical technical consultant in Togo with Peace Corps Response. At Johns Hopkins, Olga hopes to purse research in health information system development and strengthening in low and middle-income countries.

Elyse Lasser (MS Applied)

Elyse Lasser graduated with a BA in biology from Smith College in 2006, where she worked in a molecular evolution lab for three years.  Her career began at IBM’s Global Healthcare and Life Sciences department.  There she helped organize the Global Pandemic Initiative Steering Committee and worked with numerous clients in the healthcare field to set up more efficient datacenters.  It was her work at IBM that sparked Ms. Lasser’s interest in the public health field using technology and creating a more patient centered healthcare system.   Her eventual career goal is to create health education and disease prevention programs for developing nations and lower income level communities.  She would like to do this through the growing informational technology field and incorporating the traditions and cultures of each community.

Henry Li (MS Research)

As a recent biomedical engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, most of my experience with informatics has been on the biological and chemical side, in academic labs. However, I have had extensive experience designing and developing web sites and web applications, with emphasis on usability, accessibility, and standards compliance. I am particularly interested in how we can leverage the latest web technologies and practices to directly empower and benefit patients and clinicians. I aim to one day work with (or create) a health and patient focused company with the attitude of an internet startup.

Mano Ntayingi (MS Applied)

With a major in Agriculture Engineering and Natural Resources Management and a concern in public health and livelihood issues threatening rural communities D.R .Congo, Mano Ntayingi has been engaged in the fields ofPublic Health, community empowerment and Environmental Management with an interest in focusing, later, on these issues into a PhD, after gaining proficiency and skills in data and information management system critical to build a strong M&E system. The last eight years, he has been involved in project design, proposal development and project implementation including not only monitoring project management and logistics, but also in designing and evaluating exercises on data management tools, improving water and sanitation systems in rural communities and computerizing project data and mapping program activities. He has provided technical support and training to government offices, worked as a consultant with national and international Non-profit Organizations, trained post-doctorate students working on Land, Territory and Forest Management in Remote Sensing and GIS. He is planning on developing capacity in networking and in building reliable and efficient data management system essential to support the development effort in Congo by providing accurate and timely information critical to build up an evidence-based decision environment required in the prevailing context of limited resources.

Tanjala S. Purnell, MPH (NLM Fellow Research)

Tanjala Purnell is currently a Health Services Research and Policy Ph.D. student in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Management. She is also a Graduate Research Trainee at the Johns Hopkins University Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. Tanjala obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Computer Science from Tougaloo College and the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree with a specialization in Health Services Management and Policy from The Ohio State University. Her research interests focus on the intersection of health policy, consumer health informatics, telehealth, and health services research in improving health outcomes and reducing disparities in measures of access and quality for patients with multiple chronic conditions, particularly chronic kidney disease and diabetes. Tanjala has work experience in both the public sector (at federal and state government levels) and the private sector, where she has conducted evaluation studies, data analyses and completed projects related to data management. She has also worked in academic research settings where she has evaluated the incorporation of clinical information systems and e-health technology into delivery of care for youth and adolescents with chronic conditions. Her current research is related to the evaluation of consumer health informatics tools and the development of multimedia-based, educational interventions in promoting informed treatment decision-making for patients with advanced chronic kidney disease. Tanjala is confident that her experience as a Public Health Informatics Fellow will prove invaluable as she continues to build a solid foundation for a career in the academic research setting, where she hopes to also motivate and train future health services informatics researchers.

Yair Rajwan, D.Sc. (NLM Post Doctoral Fellow – Research MS)

With more than 20 years of broad business experience, Dr. Rajwan (D.Sc.) has been engaged in sale, marketing, business development, market research, proposal response, consulting services, strategic planning, product life cycle, business case, enterprise architecture, research and development (R&D), systems engineering, training, customer support, and operation and maintenance. Dr. Rajwan interest is in a patient-centric healthcare evaluation and optimization. His objective is to enable patients to have open-access to consumer-oriented health informatics, via Medicine 2.0, “Cybermedicine” and e-Health, to make an informed decision with respect to their Personal Health Record (PHR), health plan insurance records, prescribed drug interactions, as well as personalized and effective treatments producing optimized outcomes.

Terry Hsin-Yi Shen, PhD (NLM Post Doctoral Fellow – Research MS)

Terry is a postdoctoral fellow in the division of Health Sciences Informatics.  She received her bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, with a minor in Biology, from the College of William and Mary.  She completed her MSPH in Public Health Informatics from Emory University and her PhD in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Washington.  Her previous work dealt with combining epidemiologic and genetic data, which was the subject of her master’s thesis.  Her PhD dissertation dealt with the creation of an analytical system for the purposes of functional SNP annotation.  She has collaborated with the CDC, Emory’s Public Health Preparedness department, as well as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on various projects.  Terry’s current research interest continues to be exploring new intersections between Public Health Informatics and Bioinformatics.

 

2008 - 2010

Pammie Crawford, SM, M.Phil (Cantab.)

After graduating with BA/BA degrees (university/departmental honors), Pammie moved to Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia and served as a volunteer for a year through Stanford University's Volunteers In Asia (VIA) Programs. As a university lecturer at the Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan (IKIP Padang) she also served as the senior grant writer for IKIP's 37th consecutive application to the Indonesian Department of Education to become a full-state university. The grant was then selected and IKIP-Padang became Universitas Negeri Padang (State University of Padang) upgrading their status to full state university (including monies for new libraries, computer/research labs and faculty/student scholarships for continuing education). Besides her time in Indonesia she has also lived in Australia, England, Israel and Mexico.

Upon leaving Indonesia Pammie moved to the U.K. and earned an M.Phil. in International Development (Development Studies) at Cambridge University, England. While there she was awarded the Cambridge Overseas Trust by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. She then served as director of a Californian non-profit organization providing free literacy and job training services. After expanding the program to include health literacy and education, Pammie was selected as a Harvard Presidential Scholar and moved to Boston, Massachusetts where she earned a SM degree in Population & International Health at Harvard University and was named a Graduate Associate of the Center for Population and Development Studies. During her time at Harvard she worked for Mexico's National Institute of Public Health (Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica) and on Latin American/Caribbean health policy for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Regional Offices for the Americas of the World Health Organization (WHO). Pammie also traveled to Ghana to advocate for health and human Rights of the poor and marginalized ethnic minorities in Accra.

Currently a PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Pammie has served as a Johnson & Johnson Community Health Care Scholar providing monitoring and evaluation training to a clinic serving the un/under-insured of Arkansas/Oklahoma. She worked for the World Bank focusing on health and social policies targeted toward the world's poorest populations. Pammie was selected as a J. William Fulbright Fellow for 2007-2008 and lived in northern Canada as a Visiting Scholar at University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) working on aboriginal health. She is very excited to commence training on health science informatics as she is confident this field will help her achieve her goal of serving the poor, marginalized and underserved throughout the world by improving population health.

Informationist Training Program

2005-2007

Robert Swain

Trainee
rswain@cdc.gov

Douglas Varner, MS, MLS

Trainee
dvarner2@jhmi.edu

Doug Varner is currently an Informationist Fellow at the William H. Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. Previously Doug was the Library Director at the Health Sciences Library for California Pacific Medical Center and the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry in San Francisco, CA for almost 14 years. He holds a BS degree in Life Sciences and an MS degree in Veterinary Science, both from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Master of Library Science from the University of Maryland, College Park where he was employed at the National Library of Medicine and the University of Maryland Health & Human Sciences Library in Baltimore, MD. Doug is active in the Medical Library Association and was a 2001 recipient of a National Library of Medicine sponsored Fellowship in Medical Informatics conducted at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

National Library of Medicine Associates Program

2004-2006

Jeffrey Loo

Trainee
jloo1@jhmi.edu