Speaker Bio Information
Keynote Speakers
Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine where he is also the Co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics. He is also University Professor at Baylor University, Fellow in Disease and Poverty at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, Faculty Fellow with the Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies at Texas A&M University, and Health Policy Scholar in the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
Dr. Hotez is an internationally-recognized physician-scientist in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development. As head of the Texas Children’s CVD, he leads a team and product development partnership for developing new vaccines for hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and SARS/MERS/SARS-2 coronavirus, diseases affecting hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide, while championing access to vaccines globally and in the United States. In 2006 at the Clinton Global Initiative he co-founded the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases to provide access to essential medicines for hundreds of millions of people.
He obtained his undergraduate degree in molecular biophysics from Yale University in 1980 (phi beta kappa), followed by a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Rockefeller University in 1986, and an M.D. from Weil Cornell Medical College in 1987. Dr. Hotez has authored more than 500 original papers and is the author of four single-author books, including Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases (ASM Press); Blue Marble Health: An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth (Johns Hopkins University Press); Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press); and a forthcoming 2020 book on vaccine diplomacy in an age of war, political collapse, climate change and antiscience (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Dr. Hotez served previously as President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and he is founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (Public Health Section) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (Public Policy Section). In 2011, he was awarded the Abraham Horwitz Award for Excellence in Leadership in Inter-American Health by the Pan American Health Organization of the WHO. In 2014-16, he served in the Obama Administration as US Envoy, focusing on vaccine diplomacy initiatives between the US Government and countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2018, he was appointed by the US State Department to serve on the Board of Governors for the US Israel Binational Science Foundation, and is frequently called upon frequently to testify before US Congress. He has served on infectious disease task forces for two consecutive Texas Governors. For these efforts in 2017 he was named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of the 34 most influential people in health care, while in 2018 he received the Sustained Leadership Award from Research!America. In 2019 he received the Ronald McDonald House Charities Award for Medical Excellence.
Most recently as both a vaccine scientist and autism parent, he has led national efforts to defend vaccines and to serve as an ardent champion of vaccines going up against a growing national “anti-vax” threat. In 2019, he received the Award for Leadership in Advocacy for Vaccines from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dr. Hotez appears frequently on television (including BBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), radio, and in newspaper interviews (including the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal).
Nora Belcher is the Executive Director of the Texas e-Health Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group that serves as the state’s leading advocate, from local communities to the national level, for the use of information technology to improve the health care system for patients.
She is widely considered to be one of the state’s leading experts in telemedicine policy. Ms. Belcher holds a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin.
Panelists
Katherine Lusk, MHSM, RHIA, FAHIMA, is currently the senior director for strategic relationships for the Texas Health Services Authority working across the industry to facilitate secure electronic exchange of health information. She is the current president of AHIMA. She has long championed interoperability serving in multiple roles including Epic’s Care Everywhere Governing Council as Co-Lead, eHealth Exchange Workgroup Member, ONC Patient Identity Workgroup, and leading the Texas Interoperability Collaborative. Her interests span the entire spectrum of health information. She is a sought-after international speaker on information governance, standards, interoperability, clinical documentation improvement, patient identity, leveraging technology and promoting the health information profession. She is a passionate advocate for leveraging the health information professional as a stabilizing force within the healthcare ecosystem.
Dean F. Sittig, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, TX. He received his PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Utah. His research interests center on design, development, implementation, and evaluation of all aspects of clinical information and communication systems with a special emphasis on clinical decision support. He has spent his career working to improve our understanding of both the factors that lead to success, as well as, the unintended consequences associated with various forms of health information technology. He has spent considerable time studying various aspects of computer-based provider order entry with clinical decision support including factors that lead to success as well as the unintended consequences of their use. Most recently he has focused his efforts on developing guidelines for the safe and effective implementation and use of electronic health records (EHRs) that are based on an 8-dimension socio-technical model that he developed with Hardeep Singh. This work lead to the development of the SAFER guides that were designed to help healthcare organizations conduct pro-active risk assessments of their EHRs. He occasionally serves as an expert witness in legal matters that involve analysis of EHRs. He recently co-authored the following books, “Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An Implementer’s Guide, Second Edition”, “Improving Medication Use and Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support”, “Clinical Information Systems: Overcoming Adverse Consequences”, “Electronic Health Records: Challenges in Design and Implementation” and most recently “SAFER Electronic Health Records: Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience”.
Dr. Ferdinand Velasco, is Texas Health’s Chief Health Information Officer. He leads the system’s functions responsible for clinical decision support, medical informatics, nursing informatics, electronic health record reporting, quality measurement, and clinical analytics. Through his and his team’s leadership of the implementation of the electronic health record, Texas Health was awarded the Enterprise Davies Award for Excellence in 2013 and has achieved HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7.
Prior to joining Texas Health Resources in 2002, Dr. Velasco served as an assistant professor and physician champion for the implementation of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He simultaneously practiced as a cardiothoracic surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
A Fellow of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Dr. Velasco served on the North America Board of HIMSS and chaired the society’s Quality, Cost, Safety Committee. Modern Healthcare honored Dr. Velasco as an inaugural member of the Top 25 Clinical Informaticists in Healthcare. He received his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.
William Tierney, M.D., is internationally recognized for his research in biomedical informatics, health services and clinical database epidemiology. He was the founding chair of Dell Medical School’s Department of Population Health, which is playing a leading role in the school’s mission to help make Austin a model healthy city. The Department of Population Health focuses on community engagement, health equity, primary care, occupational health, global health and health information and data analytic sciences.
Previously, he spent 36 years at Indiana University and the Regenstrief Institute, where he led the implementation and study of electronic medical records and health information technologies. In 2010, he assumed the roles of president and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, associate dean for research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine for Eskenazi Health, the nation’s fourth-largest safety-net health system, where he had practiced for more than 35 years as a primary care physician, emergency physician and hospitalist. He also served as the founding director of informatics and research for the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH), a 30-year collaboration of more than 20 North American universities with universities in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
Tierney is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a master of the American College of Physicians and fellow of the Royal College of Physician–London and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.
Plenary Abstract Presenters
John Robert Bautista, RN, MPH, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the role and impact of information and communication technologies (social media, smartphones, and blockchain) among healthcare professionals and consumers. I also conduct new media (location-based advertising, social TV), health communication/informatics (mHealth, eHealth), and nursing research.
Jakub Furmaga, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. His areas of interest include bioinformatics, medical toxicology, drug testing, and laboratory medicine. He graduated University of Texas Health and Science Center at San Antonio Medical School in 2010, completed his Emergency Medicine residency at MetroHealth/Cleveland Clinic in 2013, and finished a clinical fellowship in Medical Toxicology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 2015. He is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Medical Toxicology.
RaeAnna Jeffers, is a Registered Nurse and a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her clinical experience spans 14 years of bedside nursing in the following areas: Pediatric and Adult Primary Care, Pediatric and Adult Home Health, Pediatric (inpatient) and Adult Oncology (infusion), and School Nursing. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University and a Health Informatics degree from the University of North Texas. She has plans to return for her Ph.D. in Health Informatics in January of 2022.
Rae’s passion is to find reliable ways to get the highest quality research and information into the hands of nurses, doctors, and other health practitioners at the point of need. These professionals rely on information from many sources to inform decisions on how best to help their patients and communities. Without reliable research and information, we cannot claim to be evidence-based practitioners.
Rae’s interests include the influence of publishing models on evidence-based practice principles and clinical outcomes. Many clinicians do not have access to crucial information that affects their practice because the resources are tied to membership, subscription, or some form of payment effectively locking clinicians out with paywalls. Rae is constantly searching for ways to connect clinicians to content to facilitate evidence-based care and find solutions to the issues of clinician access.
Rae lives in Breckenridge, Texas with her family and two dogs, Bailey and Brownie. Rae enjoys the outdoors and can often be found in the garden, fishing, swimming, kayaking, and hiking with the dogs and family.
Kirk Roberts, PhD, MS, is an Associate Professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). His research foci are Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), both in application areas relevant to biomedicine. Dr. Roberts has been the primary organizer of a series of biomedical IR TREC challenges conducted under the auspices of the U.S. National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST), including tasks on Clinical Decision Support, Precision Medicine, Clinical Trials, and COVID-19. He is a recipient of an NLM Career Development Award as well as a Trailblazer Award from NIBIB. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He is a member of the JAMIA Editorial Board and co-leads its Student Editorial Board.
Sameh Saleh, MD, is an internal medicine physician and healthcare data scientist/clinical informaticist with a background in computer science. He has experience in both academic and industry applications of machine learning and predictive analytics in healthcare. He is a member of the Clinical Informatics Center at UT Southwestern and recently began his Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Student Abstract Presenters
Ana Aleksandric, is a second-year PhD student in Security and Privacy at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also going into her second year with a position of Graduate Research Assistant in Health Informatics at the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics (MICHI). She received her undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Texas Wesleyan University in May 2020, which inspired her to pursue a PhD degree. It is her goal to use her discipline and knowledge to help others. Ana believes that technology and programming can be beneficial in many aspects related to improving the health and wellness of our communities.
Nicole Cevallos, is a Senior in Public Health with her minor in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington. Originally from Florida, she moved to Texas 14 years ago. While being very active and artistic with music and painting, Nicole loves sports. In such time she became very passionate about Public Health when she experienced volunteer opportunities in nursing homes and having the opportunity to shadow in hospitals. It was then that Nicole realized how communities benefit from public health principles. Nicole is currently involved in a collaborative project between MICHI and UTA’s College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs (CAPPA), the Center for Advanced Design, Research, and Evaluation (CADRE), and the global design firm, HKS Inc. Her work is a part of the cross-disciplinary partnership focused on “Advancing Sustainable Health-centric Agile Dwelling Units for an Aging Population Project”.
Debra B. Graham, MBA, BSN, RN-BC, CPHIMS, is a healthcare professional anchored in Nursing Science with over 25 years of acute hospital clinical and healthcare information technology experience with a focus on building trusted relationships by thinking like a nurse, remaining relevant and communicating. She is a strategic thinker anchored in clinical experience, keen assessment skills and proven results in performance improvement and change management. Debra is in her 3rd year of her pursuit of Doctor of Nursing practice at University of Texas at Tyler and is honored for Ellen Fineout-Overholt to be her mentor in evidenced base practice.
Mercy Obasanya, MPH, is a Public Health professional and received her Master’s in Public Health Epidemiology at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is currently volunteering as a research assistant at the Maternal and Child Health lab. Mercy is proficient in data analysis and entry using SAS University Software. She has great knowledge in Public Health, maternal and child health research, and social determinants of health research. She has experience in clinical trials and received the excellence in clinical setting award fall of 2018 at UT Arlington. She strives to continue to gain research and data analysis skills to serve the community and advance the field of public health.