PAST TRAINEES

Prudence Dalrymple, Ph.D.

Post-doc Fellow
2024 East Monument St., room 1-207 Phone: 443-287-4918 pdalrymple@jhmi.edu

Prudence Dalrymple received her Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her research focused on a cognitive model of electronic database searching. She has been on the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana –Champaign, and was dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University from 1997-2005. She also directed the Office for Accreditation at the American Library Association form 1992-1997 and has practiced as a health sciences librarian in both clinical and academic settings.

Her informatics activities include appointment to the Biomedical Library Review Committee, (now the Biomedical Library and Informatics Committee) a study section at the National Library of Medicine from 1998-2002, and to advisory boards of several grant projects. In addition to her professional activities, she has served on several editorial boards. A list of publications is available.

Dwayne Grant, MS

Graduate Student
2024 East Monument St., room 1-207 Phone: 443-287-4916 dgrant9@jhmi.edu

Dwayne Grant has more than 10 years of health care experience, which spans from both private and public sectors. He has always focused his efforts on using technology to improve patient care delivery. Mr. Grant desires to gain a better understanding of how to improve patient safety through the use of Personal Health Records and Clinical Based-Systems. Dwayne Grant holds a Bachelor's of Art in Health Science and Policy and Master's Degree in Management Information System.

Sule L. Mohammed, DVM

Post-doc Fellow
2024 East Monument St., room 1-202 Phone: 443-287-2667 smohamm4@jhmi.edu

Graduated in 1985 with the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. In Nigeria, he practiced as a public health veterinarian initially, and later as a veterinary clinician specializing in canine practice. He rose to the rank of Director of Veterinary Services in a private practice. He immigrated to the United States in late 1999 and lived in Columbus, OH before moving to Baltimore for the fellowship program. While in Columbus, he obtained the BS degree in Information Technology from DeVry University in 2003. He is also an Oracle 9i Certified DBA. He worked at the department of Pharmacy, OSU Medical Center as a senior technician and recently as a faculty at the Columbus State Community College.

He is in the public health track of the health sciences informatics program. Research interest includes information needs of zoonoses, and public health data management including data mining.

Patricia Swartz, MPH

Graduate Student
2024 East Monument St., room 1-207 Phone: 443-287-4915 pswartz3@jhmi.edu

Patricia Swartz originally came from Singapore to complete her Bachelors of Science in Biology and Medical Technology at Pacific Union College in northern California. She then went on to do a Medical Technology internship at Florida Hospital in Orlando, thereafter moving to Michigan where she worked as a Medical Technologist for eight years before completing her Master of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Before her matriculation with DHSI, she spent three years at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as an epidemiologist in Communicable Disease Surveillance and in Public Health Preparedness and Response. Her interest in public health informatics stems from a desire to help improve and strengthen the nation’s public health information infrastructure with the contribution of informatics to state and local public health agencies.

Graduate Student, NLM Fellow
2024 East Monument St., room 1-202 Phone: 443-287-2666 sxie1@jhmi.edu

Graduated from Shanghai Medical University in China with a Master of Medicine in Immunology in1993. And received her Master of Science in Information Science and Technology from Johns Hopkins School of Engineering in 2002. She has worked as a laboratory researcher for more then a decade in the areas of drug development and drug discovery, including 8 years working in Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

2004-2006

Nkossi Dambita, MS, MPH, MD

dambita@jhmi.edu

Nkossi Dambita is a public health physician import from the Central African Republic who received epidemiology training at SUNY at Buffalo (MS) and Tulane University (MPH). He achieved senior level positions at both the local and state health agencies in Maryland: Director of the Office of Grants Research Surveillance and Evaluation, concurrently with the title of HIPAA Officer and Chairman of the IRB at the Baltimore City Health Department; and Chief of the Division of Seroepidemiology in the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He has successfully managed major public health projects, including the serological surveillance of HIV in Maryland and bioterrorism in Baltimore. His informatics calling came while he was designing the multi-facetted “Baltimore Bioterrorism Surveillance System”, a syndromic surveillance system, augmented with multiple other innovative indicators to provide early warnings. He became acutely aware of the need for decision support systems (DSS) to promote better decision making and policy formulation in Public Health. His current research activity involves the study of diffusion of synchronous mobile communication technology in the clinical space of Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is a passionate advocate of knowledge management systems as a means of delivering knowledge at the point of need.

Jonathan Gold, MHA, MD

drjgold@yahoo.com
http://drjgold.monument1.jhmi.edu/

Fellowship Objectives: Focused on the development of a consumer oriented electronic health record banking system, the practical needs of the health care provider, and the considered goals of a comprehensive health care strategy.
Background: Summary--Pediatrician with a combination of training and experience in medical informatics, medical quality assurance, and primary care practice.

In 1990 Dr. Gold completed an MD from Ben-Gurion University (Beer Sheva, ISRAEL). Over the next number of years he certified as a pediatrician and also worked in the hospital's quality assurance unit. Upon completion, he worked for Maccabi Health Services (the second largest Israeli HMO) in a dual capacity-both as a primary care pediatrician in the Mitzpe Ramon clinic and as the director of the Medical Quality Assurance Unit for Maccabi's Negev region. (The Negev region includes the southern one-third of Israel; the Negev region has 150,000 members.) His responsibilities for this unit varied and included: (1) directing focused programs (e.g., adult diabetes follow-up, cardiac disease screening, pediatric asthma patient education, winter influenza vaccines for targeted audiences, smoking cessation); (2) risk management for the region; (3) monitoring physician quality indicators in the region (e.g., diabetic patient management, appropriate drug and imaging usage); and (4) serving on the HMO's national Advisory Committee for Pediatric Quality Indicators and Maccabi's Clinical Practice Guideline Committee. In 2002, he completed a Masters of Health Administration.

Sonia Klemperer-Johnson, MPH, MS

soniakj@jhmi.edu

Sonia has both a masters in public health and a master’s degree in information management and systems. Her goal for his fellowship is to research how informatics can be used in public health. Having spent 2 years in West Africa with the Peace Corps, she is especially interested in public health informatics in developing countries. Lately she has also become interested in architecture, and one of her current projects is to make recommendations for learning technology in a new medical education building for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This project is giving her the opportunity to see how architects assess requirements for a new building. Her major research is in developing a decision model for choosing the ideal formula for oral rehydration solution, the standard treatment for diarrhea around the world.

Subsequently she was Senior Analyst at Kaiser Permanente, in the Management Information and Analysis Department. Previous experience includes Peace Corps work in West Africa.

Laurent Laor, BA

llaor1@jhmi.edu

Laurent received his BA in Computer Science from New York University. Subsequently he consulted for New York Presbyterian Hospital. His most recent position was Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Urology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Other work includes technology and management consulting for small and mid-size companies. Laurent has worked for a number of medical device manufacturers and helped develop an artificial vision system for the blind at The Dobelle Institute. His primary research interest is in the cognitive burden of record sets in Electronic Healthcare Records.

Mary White, MS

Graduate Student
2024 East Monument St., room 1-207 Phone: 443-287-2665 mwhite43@jhmi.edu

Received her BA with Distinction in Psychology in 2001, and MS in Library Science in 2004 from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Was teaching assistant for a health informatics course and graduate assistant with the Get Kids in Action project. Has worked with libraries in South Africa and Honduras with the World Library Partnership.

Strong interest in health promotion and disease prevention. Her current research is the DISCO project, which involves physical activity promotion through video games with youth in east Baltimore.

Ed Bunker, MPH

Graduate Student
ebunker1@jhmi.edu

After receiving his BS in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, Ed worked for 5 years in a clinical research laboratory of NIDA creating systems for data capture and analysis. Since earning his MPH from Hopkins in 1994, he has worked as a freelance-programming consultant and as an epidemiologist with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. From 1997 to 2002, Ed was the Program Coordinator -- and then an Instructor -- with the MPH Program at Hopkins. Ed's areas of interest are information visualization, decision support for public health practice, and data capture for behavioral and qualitative research.

Cupid Gascon, MD, MBA

Post-doc Fellow
cupid@jhmi.edu

Dr. Gascon graduated from the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and completed an Emergency Medicine Residency program sponsored by the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Soon after, he volunteered to practice in a medically underserved area in Upstate New York where he tended to the healthcare needs of a rural community. During this time, he realized the relevance of optimal business practice in a healthcare organization and the need for medical informatics in the community and rural healthcare settings. Prompted by this, he finished his MBA with a concentration in management information systems at Binghamton University (SUNY) and served in leadership and strategic planning positions at his community hospital and various EMS organizations where he advocated for systems improvements, patient safety and information technology adoption. His interests include the organizational issues of technology acquisition and implementation, change management, knowledge management and the strategic use of medical logic modules (MLM). He is currently involved with MLM development of the Provider Order Entry implementation project at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Paul Law, MD MPH

Post-doc Fellow
plaw@jhmi.edu

Paul Law is a pediatrician who became interested in the informatics of research in autismpartly because of his son's mild autism. He developed a system that is currently being used bynumerous researcherscalled the Internet System for Assessing Autistic Children (ISAAC, www.autismtools.org ). This system allows researchers tomanage, and share clinical research data. In addition to his contributions in autism, Dr. Law has had a life long commitmentto international public health. He was faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the Department of InternationalHealth from 2000 until 2003. During this timehe worked with a large pediatric hospital inBangladesh to organize and utilize clinical and laboratory data. He also participated in the design of ahealthmanagement information system foracommunity-based intervention to reduce neonatal mortality. Lastly, heworked with the CDC to create an information system for aNeonatal Unitin Cairo, Egypt todetect nosocomial infections. He plans to continue his work on ISAAC and to helpin the developmentofhealth management information systems particularly intheDemocratic Republic of the Congo where he grew up.

Malinda Peeples, RN, MS, CDE

Trainee / Special Student
mpeeples@jhmi.edu

Malinda Peeples, RN, MS, CDE is a clinical nurse specialist and certified diabetes educator with a MS in Nursing Informatics from the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Most recently she worked with a multi-site diabetes education program providing clinical and information management support, including outcomes reporting and management. Additionally she has been involved in the development of the AADE National Diabetes Education Outcomes System - a comprehensive web-based, reporting service for diabetes outcomes at the patient, program, and national levels. Currently her informatics interest is focused on classification of diabetes program characteristics for benchmarking, evaluation and building the evidence base for diabetes education. She is also interested in gaining expertise in workflow analysis and technology integration.