Instructors

Michael Baltasi, PhD, has held leadership positions in corporate IT and university administration for over ten years. He currently serves as Deputy Director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago. In this role, Baltasi oversees financial planning, marketing, and the project portfolio for the organization, and serves as a key decision-maker in technical investments and industry partnerships. His teaching interests probe the intersection between data science and the conceptually-rich fields of managerial science and leadership theory.

Prashila Dullabh, MD, is a senior fellow and Health Informatics Program Area Director at NORC at the University of Chicago.  She is a clinician informatician with more than fifteen years of experience in informatics, healthcare and health services research.

At NORC, Dr. Dullabh directs technical assistance, evaluation and strategic projects for federal agencies and foundations. She recently completed a five-year mixed-method evaluation of the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Dr. Dullabh has also led various other evaluations including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Fee-For-Service Personal Health Record Pilot, the Common Ground evaluation for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Specification (ELINCS) standard for the California Healthcare Foundation, and the CMS electronic prescribing pilots. Additionally, Dr. Dullabh has directed large technical assistance centers, including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health IT and the Health Resources and Services Administration Health IT Technical Assistance Center.

Prior to joining NORC, Dr. Dullabh served as the Informatics and Clinical Team Manager at PHNS/Adventist Healthcare where she was responsible for large-enterprise wide clinical implementation projects.

An information security professional with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a masters in computer science, both from the University of Chicago, Jason Edelstein’s experience covers everything from securing email gateways to academic systems management to teaching and mentoring. He works as the IT Risk and Compliance Program Manager at the University of Chicago.

Dan Exley has been a leader in analytics and informatics since leading major aspects of the Epic deployment at NorthShore University Health System in 2002—the first enterprise-wide Epic project. He created and lead the Analytics and Data Strategy division at MemorialCare Health System in Southern California, supporting transformation from a group of acute-care facilities to an integrated delivery system providing outcomes-driven health and wellness services to a population of over a million patients per year. 

To develop the next generation of healthcare informatics professionals, Exley co-developed the medical Informatics program at National Louis University in Chicago in 2008. From 2009 to 2012, he was the program coordinator for the federally funded ONC HIT Workforce Development program in Orange County, California. He has been a regular lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business, the University of Chicago Graham School, and was lecturer and co-developer of the healthcare analytics program at California State University Fullerton Mihaylo College of Business and Economics.

Exley holds a Master of Science in medical informatics from Northwestern University and is a fellow of the Advisory Board Company.

Larry Helseth, PhD, is a translational bioinformatician at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois. He was trained as a biochemist, has both wet lab and dry lab experience, and has worked in both academics and the healthcare industry. His current role is developing software to analyze genomic data for integration into the patient’s medical record. 

Recent projects included helping to implement pharmacogenomics screening at NorthShore, developing software to help pathologists interpret cancer panel results and building a variant repository to manage genomic data. His research interests include integrating multiple ‘omics and using mass spectrometry to study protein structure and function.

Jane Hol is a pediatrician and fellowship-trained health services and outcomes researcher. She led the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research and the Center for Education in Health Sciences at Northwestern University for more than ten years. Her academic activities focus on patient safety, quality of care, healthcare delivery, and applied implementation research, as well as, the creation of novel graduate education programs.

She is currently engaged in extramurally-funded research projects focused on the redesign of delivery of stroke care (E-SPEED), diagnostic error in stroke (THESIS), enhanced recovery in children after surgery (ENRICH-US), and self-care of newly diagnosed diabetes patients (DIY-DM). 

Cheng-Kai Kao, MD, is an assistant professor and academic hospitalist in the department of medicine where he is the medical director of informatics, chair of the clinical process review committee, and medical director of international patient services. He is board certified in clinical informatics and his areas of interests include mobile health, clinical decision support, population health and international patient care. In his role as medical director of informatics, his work focuses on leveraging mobile technology to enhance clinical workflow, developing clinical decision support tools, and making innovations to improve care quality and patient experience.

Read about Dr. Kao's thoughts on Driving Innovation in Healthcare Informatics and why entrepreneurship will continue to play a central role in the field’s growth.

Imran Khan currently serves as the Director of Clinical Research Strategic Initiatives at AbbVie, where he is responsible for strategic planning and execution of enterprise capabilities for the Drug Development Organization. Previously, Imran served on the Senior Management team at AbbVie for launching new drugs and strategic technology capabilities in the theraputic areas of virology, oncology, and neuroscience. Prior to joining biopharma, Imran worked for Advocate Health Care, a large integrated delivery network health system in the state of Illinois and the largest community of hospital-affiliated physicians in the United States. In other roles, Imran worked for GE Healthcare and Walgreens, where he developed and supported several clinical and pharmaceutical applications. Imran earned his BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, an MS in Medical Informatics from Northwestern University, and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Liebovitz is a practicing internal medicine physician also board certified in clinical informatics with engineering training. He has led numerous information technology projects for use in clinical practice and research. Operational leadership experience includes former roles as Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Chief Medical Information Officer at University of Chicago Medicine. He received a BA and an MD from the University of Illinois. 

Anoop Mayampurath is a senior research scientist at the Computation Institute and a senior statistician at the Center for Research Informatics, as well as an instructor for the MSCP program at the University of Chicago. His research interests lie in the application of statistical and machine learning algorithms for life science and medical studies. His work currently focuses on statistical modeling and analytics-research for clinical data towards improving patient outcome and hospital care.

Melvin S. Munsaka is a senior director and head of the Safety Statistics Group at AbbVie in the statistical sciences department. He has a PhD in mathematical statistics from Queen’s University in Canada, as well as an MSc in mathematical statistics and an MEd in mathematics from McGill University in Canada. Melvin has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for more than twenty years. He co-leads some initiatives of the Drug Information Association Bayesian Scientific Working Group Safety Subteam and some initiatives of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section Safety Working Group. He is also Publicity Chair of the Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop and has held positions of president, program chair, and chapter representative of the Northeast Illinois Chapter of the ASA and is past chair of the ASA Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts and member at-large of the executive xommittee of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section. He is also the secretary of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Public Schools Science Fair, Inc. He continues to pursue research in his areas of interest in statistics and computing and to explore ideas related to ML, AI, and NLP especially as they apply to dug safety. He is regularly involved in professional meetings and has contributed to conference presentations, book chapters and journal articles and peer reviews journal articles.

Valerie Press is an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics and is Executive Medical Director of specialty value-based care at the University of Chicago. She received her undergraduate, medical, and public health degrees from the University of Michigan before completing her internal medicine-pediatrics combined residency training at the University of Chicago. After residency, she completed a Hospitalist Scholars Health Services Research Fellowship. Since Fellowship she has completed both an internal KM1 and an NIH K23 career development award and is currently funded by an NIH R03 grant. 

She has published dozens of papers related to her research and has received awards for this work, including the Junior Investigator Award from the Society of Hospital Medicine in 2017 and the Early Career Achievement Award from the American Thoracic Society in 2019. She had mentored over two dozen undergraduate and medical students and was awarded the John D. Arnold Mentor Award from the Pritzker School of Medicine this past spring.

In addition to her research and education roles, she co-directs the COPD Value Based Care Program and supports other specialty value based care programs through her role as Medical Director with the Center for Care Transformation. 

Krishna has been a leader in health care for more than fifteen years. He currently serves as a vice president of health data strategy and enterprise network operations at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of IL, MT, NM, OK, and TX, where he is responsible for developing and executing their health data exchange strategy with providers and external partners across five states. Before joining BCBS, he served as Chief Administrative Officer of DuPage Medical Group and its subsidiary, Boncura Health Solutions. Other roles at DuPage included Chief Information and Transformation Officer. Prior to DuPage, he held leadership roles at Epic Systems Corporation. Krishna is actively involved in healthcare associations and local nonprofits. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (India), an MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

A population health scientist and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Nicholas Soulakis’ research focus lies at the intersection of epidemiology and informatics with an emphasis on understanding the data-rich environment created by health information technology. By leveraging computationally intensive analytical techniques to monitor healthcare quality, his current work seeks to develop a more comprehensive scientific approach to understanding the dynamics of care coordination for hospitalized patient populations.

Michael Stiehl, MS, is a senior policy analyst with Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. With over fifteen years of experience in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis, he brings an extensive understanding of how to successfully incorporate GIS into sound project planning, strategy development and the use of metrics to guide implementation and evaluation. Mr. Stiehl’s areas of interest include public policy, with a focus on child welfare, community development, education and human services, data analysis, data visualization, strategic planning, and policy development. Currently, his work focuses on understanding complex human service delivery systems, administrative data and the role of state agencies and community based organizations in improving outcomes for vulnerable populations.

Dr. Volchenboum is an associate professor of pediatrics and the associate chief research informatics officer for the biological sciences division at the University of Chicago. He is the Dean of Masters Programs and directs a program in health sciences informatics for the division. His clinical specialty is pediatric hematology/oncology, caring for kids with cancer and diseases of the blood. In addition to his clinical practice, he directs the University of Chicago’s Pediatric Cancer Data Commons, a research group dedicated to liberating and democratizing data for pediatric malignancies.

Until 2019, Dr. Volchenboum directed the Center for Research Informatics, a forty-person group that supports biological research throughout the division. As director of this center, he oversaw high-performance computing, HIPAA-compliant storage and backup, application development to support clinical trials, development and maintenance of the clinical trials management system, the clinical research data warehouse, data analytics and visualization, and bioinformatics, including high-throughput genomic analyses and machine learning. He participates in and leads various data governance initiatives throughout the University and medical center. He is the director of the Informatics Core for the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). Since 2015, he has been the faculty director for the Master's in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Chicago.