Previous Postdoctoral Fellows

This section describes fellows at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics who have completed training as of June 30, 2012.

Jose Gomez-Villalobos, MD (7/1/10-6/30/12)

Position after Fellowship: Instructor, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Gomez-Villalobos worked on translational projects involving asthma. One study which used expression microarray data from induced sputum samples revealed the presence of groups of genes involved in apoptosis, leukotriene pathways and cytokine signaling pathways not previously identified in severe asthma. Dr. Gomez-Villalobos received an MS in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics during his fellowship.

Nitu Kashyap, MD (10/1/09-1/31/11)

Position after Fellowship: Medical Director for EPIC Ambulatory Project,Yale-New Haven Hospital; Attending Physician, YNHH Primary Care Center
Research: Dr. Kashyap developed a personal health record portal to be used as tool to decrease readmission rates for complicated patients discharged from the hospital. She worked on the GuideLine Implementability Appraisal (GLIA) tool and developed a web version of the same (eGLIA).

Sergiy Konovalov, MD (7/7/08-7/6/10)

Position after Fellowship: In transition
Research: Dr. Konovalov worked on a project involving Natural Language Processing and computerized extraction techniques on free text contained in web logs. He also built a Web/database application to facilitate the analysis of GWAS datasets.

Negin Hajizadeh, MD (7/1/09-6/30/10)

Position after Fellowship: Instructor, NYU School of Medicine (K-12 Award) (also appointments at Yale School of Medicine)
Research: Dr. Hajizadeh developed a decision tree of advance directives for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), into a Markov analytic model. This model incorporates patient preferences such as utilities of discharge location after hospitalization, and hospital specific outcomes such as complication rates, to better guide the advance directive discussion at the point of care (between clinician and patient).

Edwin Lomotan, MD (7/1/08-4/30/10)

Position after Fellowship: Health Scientist Administrator, AHRQ, Rockville, MD
Research: Dr. Lomotan’s research focused on transformation of clinical guidelines into computerized decision support. In the GuideLines Into Decision Support (GLIDES) project, he worked on translating guidelines for pediatric asthma and obesity in to locally implemented decsition support tools. He also was involved with the Effective Representation of Guidelines with Ontologies (ERGO) project and focused on the development of quality measures using the Quality data set from the National Quality Forum.

George Gorgon, MD (9/1/07-8/31/09)

Position after Fellowship: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Molecular Genetic Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Research: Dr.Gorgon worked on several projects: 1. Identifying gene expression patterns in Triple Negative Malignant Breast Carcinoma (identified as HER-2, Estrogen and Progesterone receptors negative malignant ductal and lobular carcinoma of the breast). 2. Identifying and explaining micro RNA molecules role in malignant transformation in common gynecologic malignancies such as breast and ovary. 3. Identifying genes responsible for malignant transformation with relation to Polycomb proteins in common gynecologic malignancies.

Mona Duggal, MD (7/1/06-6/30/09)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr.Duggal worked on a project on the acceptability of computer based self-administered questionnaire for collection of socially sensitive data in veteran populations. The study aimed to improve long term data quality and collection in the multi center Veteran Aging Cohort Study.

Tamseela Hussain, MD (3/1/07-2/28/09)

Position after Fellowship: Medical Informatics Consultant, Dallas, TX
Research: Dr. Hussain helped develop the Yale Guideline Corpus (YGRC), which was used to better understand how current recommnedations are written and to test the adequacy of guideline models. She also worked on developing methods for quality and performance measurement using the VA’s electronic medical record system.

Matthew Scotch, PhD, MPH (7/1/06-6/30/08)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale School of Medicine (K Award)
Research: Dr. Scotch’s research focused on combining health data on animals and humans to enhance zoonotic disease surveillance capabilities at local and state health department levels. He also earned an MPH from the Yale School of Public Health.

Sheryl LaCoursiere, PhD (7/1/06-6/30/08)

Position after Fellowship: Lecturer, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. LaCoursiere worked on several Veterans Administration projects relating to the use of clinical guidelines and patient outcomes. She also worked with the Yale School of Nursing to curate and analyze data from the Breast Cancer Internet Information and Support (BCIIS) Study.

Eleanne Solorzano Dowd, PhD (10/15/05-8/31/07)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Professor, University of New Hampshire
Research: Dr. Solorzano Dowd explored different statistical approaches to identifying genomic regions that are particularly subject to natural selection, using population genotype data. She studied signals of natural selection in lactase across different populations, and used various selection methods such as the extended homozygosity test and a new window method.

Can Bruce, PhD (7/1/05-6/30/07)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Director, Bioinformatics Resource, Keck Biotech Resource Lab, Yale University
Research: Dr. Bruce conducted research in two areas of bioinformatics. The first project analyzed mass spectrometry data of phosphopeptides. The second project involved chromatin immunoprecipitation on chip data to study dynamic regulation of transcription in yeast.

Prem Thomas, MD (7/1/04-6/30/07)

Position after Fellowship: Medical Informatics Consultant; Attending Physician, Hospital of Saint Raphael, New Haven, CT
Research: In his main project, Dr. Thomas developed measures of quality of care for glycemic management of inpatients and created a web service freely available to inpatient institutions for online submission of glucose data with subsequent calculation of quality metrics. The web service is available at http://metrics.med.yale.edu.

Hyung Min Paek, MD (1/26/04-1/25/07)

Position after Fellowship: Research Scientist, Clinical Medical Informatics, West Haven VA, CT
Research: In one research project, Dr. Paek used data mining techniques, including shallow semantic parsing, to increase the accuracy of searching free text in a large medical database. He also worked on implementing ophthalmology guidelines on primary open angle glaucoma in an EMR in a private practice setting.

Yacov Kogan, MD (8/1/04-7/31/06)

Position after Fellowship: Physician Consultant, NextGen, Horsham, PA
Research: Dr. Kogan worked on a natural language processing project which applied the concept of semantic role labeling in the medical domain. He was also involved in a project which incorporated practice guidelines in an ophthalmology electronic medical record.

Seymour Codish, MD (7/1/04-6/30/06)

Position after Fellowship: Clinical Decision Support Coordinator, Soroka University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Research: Dr. Codish worked on several clinical informatics projects, including 1) a model of ambiguity and vagueness in clinical practice guidelines; 2) development of the electronic GuideLine Implementability Appraisal (eGLIA) instrument; and 3) audit and feedback with clinical decision support to improve care of children with asthma.

Andrea Benin, MD (7/1/03 – 6/30/04,7/1/05-11/18/05)

Position after Fellowship: System Director for Clinical Quality, Yale-New Haven Health System
Research: Dr. Benin worked on measuring quality and safety of clinical care for outpatients using the electronic medical record. She developed tools for extracting and analyzing data from the electronic medical record and for text processing. She worked on methodologies to ensure that measures of quality and safety are properly validated. In addition, Dr. Benin worked on several qualitative studies regarding attitudes to vaccination.

Abdel Essaihi, MD (10/14/02 – 10/13/05)

Position after Fellowship: Informatics consulting
Research: Dr. Essaihi worked on clinical informatics projects involving medical knowledge representation, decision support systems design requirements, and clinical practice guideline development and implementation. His most recent project involved mapping decision variables (clinical concepts upon which guideline-warranted actions are conditionally based) to the UMLS, and representing guideline recommendations as Petri nets to streamline workflow integration.

Qin Zhang, PhD (8/16/02 - 8/15/05)

Position after Fellowship: Client Tech Specialist, Research Computing, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, NY
Research: In several neuroinformatics projects, Dr. Zhang worked extensively to develop the Entity-Attribute-Value with Classes and Relationships (EAV/CR) architecture to support a wide range of funtionalities and interoperation. For the SenseLab Project, he designed and developed the BrainPharm database of agents and drugs that act on receptors and signal transduction pathways.

Allen Hsiao, MD (7/1/04 - 6/30/05)

Position after Fellowship: Clinical Instructor, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Yale School of Medicine; Physician Liaison, ITS, Yale-New Haven Hospital
Research: Dr. Hsiao worked on a project to appraise the implementability of clinical guidelines and participated in a study of the efficacy of point-of-care testing in the pediatric emergency department. He also assisted with implementation of the Logician EMR system in the PED.

Nian Liu, PhD (7/1/02 - 6/30/05)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Liu was involved with several projects. 1) For the SenseLab Project, he developed OdorMapBuilder and collaborated with experimentalists in the Yale MRI Research Center in applying this software program to generate odor maps from 3-dimensional fMRI data. 2) For the GeneCube Project, he wrote tools to use knowledge in the Gene Ontology (GO) database to analyze microarray data and displayed the analytic results in a dynamic GO term tree. 3) He also built a Web-based database system supporting gene microarray studies on olfactory receptors.

Michael Osier, PhD (10/1/02 - 7/31/04)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Bioinformatics, Department of Biological Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
Research: Dr. Osier's main project was developing a tool to provide post-analysis interpretation of microarray data in the contect of curated knowledgebases such as the Gene Ontology Database. He also worked on the development of the Yale Microarray Database.

Lyudmila Druskin, MD (7/1/02 - 6/30/04)

Position after Fellowship: Medical Informatics Specialist, Apelon, Ridgefield, CT
Research: Dr. Druskin participated in a project to create web-based services for analysis of microarray data. She also developed a Java and XML-based tool for integration of heterogeneous genetic databases.

Deyun Pan, PhD (7/1/02 - 6/30/04)

Position after Fellowship: Research Scientist, Bioinformatics, American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), Manassas, VA
Research: Dr. Pan worked on developing databases and statistical tools for analyzing microarray data, including web tools for displaying gene expression data.

Cesar Rodriguez, MD (7/16/01 - 7/15/03)

Position after Fellowship: Graduate Student, Biomedical Informatics, Stanford University
Research: Dr. Rodriguez's main project was developing a flexible application to automate the management of metadata captured in Trial/DB, YCMI's clinical study data management system. He also participated in the development of data analysis software used by two microarray data management applications, Gene Cube and Cruella.

Ryan O'Connell, MD (7/16/01 - 7/15/03)

Position after Fellowship: Attending Physician, West Haven VA Hospital Emergency Department; Physician-Liaison, Information Technology, Bridgeport Hospital, Bridgeport, CT.
Research: Dr. O'Connell worked on a project to map object-oriented software systems to relational databases in bioscience domains. He also participated in a study of differences in EHR satisfaction between Internal Medicine and Pediatrics clinics.

Peter Gershkovich, MD (11/1/00 - 10/31/02)

Position after Fellowship: Senior Database/Application Developer, Department of Pediatrics/IT Department, UMASS Medical School, Worcester, MA
Research: Dr. Gershkovich participated in the development of a Web-based application for processing microarray data with particular interests in issues of uploading large volumes of local experimental data and data extracted from public Web-based databases. He worked with Prof. Richard Shiffman on conversion of clinical guidelines into GEM (Guideline Element Module) and studied implementation methods for GEM-encoded clinical guidelines. He also worked on the implementation of asthma guidelines in the Logician system at Yale New Haven Hospital.

David Tuck, MD (9/1/00 - 8/31/02)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Yale University School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Tuck worked on developing tools for data management and analysis for bioinformatics projects involving DNA microarray and Tissue microarray research.

Aniruddha Deshpande, MD (7/13/00 - 6/30/02)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Deshpande's main project involved developing a Web-based interface to allow ad-hoc query of Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) structured data stored in Yale's Trial/DB clinical research database. The EAV approach allows great flexibility to capture new types of data without the need to reprogram the database, but poses a set of interesting challenges for implementing efficient ad-hoc query of the data.

Nicholas Tosches, MD, MS (9/1/99 - 8/31/01)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Tosches worked with Prof. Perry Miller and members of the Department of Anesthesiology to expand ClinQuest, an application which provides topic-mediated linking between an electronic medical record (EMR) and Web-based information resources. He assisted in the development of a pre-anesthesia module for the Hospital's CCSS system (the EMR) and the integration of ClinQuest into CCSS. Dr. Tosches also worked with Prof. Kei Cheung on the yeast genome project on issues of database interoperability and the development of Web-accessible databases.

Abha Agrawal, MD (8/1/99 - 7/31/01)

Position after Fellowship: Director, Medical Informatics, Lown Cardiovascular Center and Research Foundation, Brookline, MA
Research: Dr. Agrawal worked with Prof. Richard Shiffman and others on the development of GEM (Guideline Element Module), an XML format for modeling clinical practice guidelines. She created a guideline quality assessment tool (GEM-Q) that can be used by guideline developers and implementers to evaluate fulfillment of predefined quality criteria. Dr. Agrawal was also involved in a project to develop a set of data elements and terms to be used for describing microarray experiments.

Bryant Karras, MD (8/1/98 - 8/31/00)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Research: Dr. Karras participated in a number of projects. As a member of the ambulatory care information system team, he had a active role in implementing Medicalogic’s Logician electronic medical record in outpatient clinics of Yale-New Haven Hospital. He worked on the YCMI Guideline Elements Model (GEM), an XML based approach to organizing and storing information contained in clinical practice guidelines. He worked with Prof. Richard Shiffman on the design and implementation of PalmAsthma, a handheld computing application which supports the chronic care of asthmatic children. Dr. Karras also helped the YCMI Trial/DB team with the refinement of this protocol authoring tool.

Sujai (Ron) Nath, MD (8/10/98 - 8/9/00)

Position after Fellowship: Product Manager, Apelon, Inc., Ridgefield, CT
Research: Dr. Nath worked on two projects involving XML applications. The first involved using XML and XQL tools to integrate web-accessible yeast genomic databases. As a member of the Guideline Elements Model (GEM) project, he assisted in the development of an XML format for modeling clinical practice guidelines. Dr Nath also worked on the PalmAsthma patient management application and participated on the medical center’s ambulatory care information system implementation team.

Luis Marenco, MD (7/1/99 - 6/30/00)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Marenco's primary project involved developing a flexible approach (Entity-Attribute-Value with Classes and Relationships - EAV/CR) to storing heterogeneous bioscience data, and to port four our of Human Brain Project neuroscience databases into that format.

David Stein, MD (1/12/98 - 1/11/00)

Position after Fellowship: Chief Medical Officer, Neuvis, Inc., Shelton , CT
Research: Dr. Stein worked on one project in the context of the VA clinical data repository exploring the relative contribution of coded and textual data in answering clinical queries. He also worked on a collaborative project involving the Department of Anesthesiology and the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, to explore how data from several institutional databases might be merged to answer specific clinical queries.

Roland Chen, MD, MS (12/1/97 - 10/31/99)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Chen worked on several projects. One involved exploring the use and design of an experimental clinical data repository containing data from the VA patient record, and using that data to develop strategies for testing the performance of the EAV/CR database approach. Another project involved developing a computer-based guideline for depression, working closely with Prof. Bruce Baker of Psychiatry, and using the program to assess compliance with the guideline in practice.

Emmanouil Skoufos, PhD (7/1/97 - 10/31/99)

Position after Fellowship: Senior Bioinformatics Consultant, 3rd Millennium, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Research: Dr. Skoufos worked on three main projects. He helped develop and administer a set of databases centering around the olfactory system as part of our Human Brain Project work. He worked with Prof. Kidd on a genetics project which involves analyzing the sequences upstream from genes in a large sequence of DNA involving the homeobox region, looking for features such as regulatory motifs, with the additional goal of building computer-based tools to assist in that process. He also worked with Prof. Synder to analyze data relating to the yeast genome and test the hypotheses derived from these analyses experimentally in the laboratory.

Mark Mattie, MD, PhD (7/1/97 - 6/30/99)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Department of Pathology and Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Mattie's main activity involved developing PathMaster, a pathology cell-image database system. The database contains images obtained by digitally imaging cells, each indexed by computationally-derived descriptors. When a pathologist is confronted with a slide containing a cell whose diagnosis is uncertain, PathMaster can automatically compute descriptors for the unknown cell and retrieve images of "similar" cells from its database, as a "visual differential diagnosis" to help the user classify the unknown cell.

James Liu, MD (7/15/96 - 7/14/98)

Position after Fellowship: Health Teaching Fellow, Yale-China Association & Human Medical University (one year)
Research: Dr. Liu was involved in several projects. One project explored the use of fuzzy logic in representing clinical guideline knowledge. A second project involved developing enhancements and extensions to a pediatric health maintenance database and exploring data cleaning issues that occur in childhood immunization histories. In addition, Dr. Liu played a very active role in medical center wide clinical computing activities, including helping plan for the deployment of an ambulatory care information system within Yale New Haven Medical Center.

Yischon Liaw, MD (9/1/96 - 8/31/98)

Position after Fellowship: In transition
Research: Dr. Liaw worked on the AMOS Project (Asthma Management in the Outpatient Setting). He helped to complete the software for AsthMonitor, a hand-held, Newton-based system designed to facilitate guideline implementation, and participated in the clinical trial that assessed its effectiveness. As an active participant in the YCMI Guidelines Review Group, he was also involved in modeling generic processes in guideline implementation. Additionally, he prototyped the use of a pen-based system for data entry into SEURAT, a pediatric health maintenance database.

Cynthia Brandt, MD, MPH (10/23/95 - 8/31/97)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Yale Center for Medical Informatics
Research: Dr. Brandt was involved in a number of projects. One project involved developing a model for visualizing the detailed logic contained in the CDC's guidelines for childhood immunization. A second project involved helping build SEURAT, which gathers clinical information in the YNHH Pediatric Primary Care Center using scannable forms. A third project involved helping in the design and implementation of ACT/DB, our clinical trials database.

Lori Fernandes, MD (10/26/95 - 8/31/97)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Director, Yale Clinical Trials Office
Research: Dr. Fernandes worked on several projects. One project involved building a simulation model of the process of carrying out a clinical trial. A second project explored how semantic relations between clinical terms could help facilitate Web-based retrieval of information relevant to a particular patient's care.

Thomas J. Handler, MD (8/1/94-6/30/97)

Position after Fellowship: Senior Research Analyst, Gartner Group, Stamford, CT
Research: Dr. Handler worked on a number of projects. Several projects were with Dr. Carl Jaffe developing Computer-Aided Instruction modules designed for radiology residents and medical students. These included building a multimedia application involving images from nuclear medicine, his clinical specialty. He also worked extensively with the Department of Diagnostic Radiology helping plan for the implementation of a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) at YNHMC.

Donald Miller, MD (8/22/94 - 8/12/96)

Position after Fellowship: Physician Executive, Cerner, Inc., Dallas, TX
Research: Dr. Donald Miller worked with Dr. Shiffman to implement a guideline for treatment of asthma on a hand held computing device (an Apple Newton). He also worked with Dr. Perry Miller to build a computer-based tool which uses semantic constraints to help verify the completeness of an expert system dealing with childhood immunization.

Alex Poljak, MD (7/1/94 - 6/30/96)

Position after Fellowship: Director of Medical Informatics Research and Development, MedLink, Inc., New York, NY
Research: Dr. Poljak was particularly interested in the use of hand-held computing in outpatient and emergency settings. He focused on two issues: 1) how best to display clinical data for different types of clinical problems, and 2) how to structure the relationship between clinical terms in a fashion that could help drive the organized gathering of data describing a patient's history and physical examination.

Joseph Kannry, MD (6/30/93 - 6/29/95)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY
Research: Dr. Kannry worked on several projects. One project examined issues involved in mapping an existing structured controlled vocabulary, the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) developed at Columbia University, to the laboratory and pharmacy vocabularies of Yale New Haven Hospital. This project also identified certain desirable features of a structured controlled vocabulary that could facilitate such a mapping process. A second project examined the feasibility of using a neural network to assist in bibliographic retrieval.

Jeremy Yim, MD (7/1/93 - 6/30/95)

Position after Fellowship: Fellow, Department of Neurology, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Yim's interests centered on the development of multi-media, computer-aided instructional programs in neurology. He developed programs dealing with movement disorders, stroke, and interventional neuroradiology. He was also involved in the development of a neurology outpatient database. Dr. Yim plans to continue his research in CAI and Internet-based, multimedia learning projects in neurology.

Scot Silverstein, MD (6/1/92 - 6/30/94)

Position after Fellowship: Associate Research Scientist, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Silverstein worked on two main projects. One project involved exploring how the information sources map of the Unified Medical Language System project might be tailored to the domain of occupational and environmental medicine (OEM). His approach involved including domain-specific knowledge to allow a user to be directed to online information sources that might be relevant to an OEM topic of interest. The second project involved developing databases for gene mapping research, focusing in particular on how a graphical user interface outlining the database schema could help a computer-naive biologist formulate queries in a flexible, user-friendly fashion.

Mark G. Schippits, MD (7/1/92 - 6/30/94)

Position after Fellowship: Medical Informatics R&D Staff, Clinical Information Systems, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Groton, CT
Research: Dr. Schippits worked on several projects. One project involved developing a set of clinical alerts and reminders for hematology for future incorporation into our patient care system. A second project involved helping in the development of a geriatrics information system at the Adler Geriatrics Center at Yale. An additional project involved developing MUPIT, a "multi-purpose image tool" which explored the types of capability useful for multimedia presentation of different types of clinical material, and also explored how such presentations might be composed easily by clinicians with little technical computer experience.

John Reinitz, PhD (2/1/91 - 3/30/93)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Molecular Biology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Reinitz worked closely with Prof. Eric Mjolsness (Computer Science), Prof. Leo Buss. (Biology and Geology and Geophysics), and Dr. David Sharp (Los Alamos National Laboratory) to develop a connectionist model of gene regulation, using gene expression data obtained from the laboratory to understand the regulatory relationships among genes during the blastoderm stage of development in Drosophila. Because these regulatory relationships are complex, a computer model is required to understand the large number of simultaneous regulatory interactions which take place.

Jay Lichter, PhD (7/1/91 - 3/31/92)

Position after Fellowship: Research Staff, DuPont
Research: Dr. Lichter worked on several projects involving database support for biological gene mapping activities. He also collaborated with YCMI staff to develop software tools to assist in interpreting experimental results in areas of restriction digest mapping and cosmid contig assembly.

John Jachna, MD (7/1/90 - 6/30/92)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, University of Arizona School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Jachna's major interest centered on computer-based teaching in psychiatry. One project involved developing the MIST (Medical Information Sources Tutor) system, a prototype program which explores how to help a student learn to use online information resources in the context of reviewing an online psychiatric consultation case summary. A second project involved developing a set of computer-based simulations of cases encountered in the psychiatric emergency room. Dr. Jachna also participated in various activities involving the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project, helping test and evaluate UMLS tools developed at Yale.

Lewis Berman, MD (9/1/90 - 6/30/92)

Position after Fellowship: Fellow, Pulmonary Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Berman worked on two projects. In one project, he collaborated with the Section of Occupational Medicine to create an expert system in the domain of occupational asthma, exploring how external databases could be integrated with an expert system to augment its ability to provide clinical assistance. In the second project, he collaborated with the Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine to help design and build an advanced ventilatory monitoring system. He plans to continue this work as the basis for designing more intelligent critical care monitoring and alarm systems.

Jeffrey Clyman, MD (9/1/88 - 6/30/91)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Clyman worked on several projects. He supervised the clinical evaluation of the HT-Advisor program which critiques a physician's management of essential hypertension. He has also developed an advisor program in the field of hyperlipidemia management. This program was built using tools (which Dr. Clyman developed) which facilitate the construction of such systems.

Mark Shifman, MD, PhD (7/1/90 - 6/30/91)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Center for Medical Informatics, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Shifman was involved in several projects. He developed a clinical consultation system which gives advice concerning hepatitis testing. A second project used the machine-independent parallel programming language, Linda, to parallelize molecular dynamics computations. He also helped lead a project to build databases and analytic tools for gene mapping data produced by several biological laboratories at Yale.

Sheldon Ball, MD, PhD (7/1/88 - 6/30/90)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor of Pathology, University of Mississippi School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Ball used object-oriented programming techniques to make bioscience knowledge interactive. Concentrating on the domain of neurodegenerative disease, Dr. Ball implemented a prototype system that contains knowledge derived from the literature, and is able to answer questions flexibly about that knowledge. Knowledge is proliferating in bioscience but currently sits passively in articles, widely distributed, unrelated, and very difficult to access. Dr. Ball explored how this situation might be changed to make the knowledge much more accessible.

Aaron Cohn, MD (7/1/88 - 1/31/90)

Position after Fellowship: Resident, Yale Department of Anesthesiology; Assistant Professor, Anesthesiology, University of Texas at Galveston
Research: Dr. Cohn worked primarily on two projects. One is the IMAGE/ICON project, an expert system designed for use by radiologists. Dr. Cohn implemented AXON, a prototype system for the intelligent retrieval of images through use of "axes" of clinical relevance. Dr. Cohn also worked on the Intelligent Cardiovascular Monitor (ICM) project. A prototype of the ICM runs on a parallel computer. Dr. Cohn made a major contribution to the project by helping define clinical patterns (e.g., hypovolemia) as a set of temporally related states, each state reflecting different severities of the pattern.

Nolan Core, MD (7/1/87 - 6/30/89)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology, SUNY, Stonybrook, NY
Research: Dr. Core explored aspects of parallelizing biological sequence comparison algorithms. One project involved looking at a standard algorithm which uses dynamic programming techniques to match DNA sequences. Working with Dr. Joel Saltz (Computer Science), Dr. Core explored runtime optimization problems of adapting the parallelized algorithm to a particular problem size so as to optimize performance on a particular machine. A second project involved working with Dr. David Foulser (Computer Science) to use the position tree sequence comparison algorithm to match automatically areas of similarity among multiple sequences.

Paul Fisher, MD (7/1/86 - 6/30/88)

Position after Fellowship: Assistant Professor, Diagnostic Radiology, Yale School of Medicine
Research: Dr. Fisher's primary research project involved exploring how the Scripts formalism, developed by Prof. Roger Schank, could be used to model knowledge about lung tumors seen as solitary pulmonary nodules on chest x-rays. Separate scripts modeled the disease process from different perspectives, including the perspective of the disease itself, and the perspective of the workup process.