MD-PhD trainee Cindy Chen joined Lee as one of eight people to earn a place in the student paper competition. Chen presented her study “Knowledge Engineering for Medical Vocabularies Using Large Language Models.”

Recently graduated PhD student Adrienne Pichon, now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Lena Mamykina Lab, was named a finalist for the Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award. Pichon’s dissertation was entitled “Supporting the Work of Patients and Providers in Complex Chronic Illness.”

Weng Earns Lindbergh Honor

The Weng Lab is focused on clinical research informatics. Her lab develops novel methods to improve the efficiency and generalizability of clinical trials research, to facilitate human phenotyping using electronic health records data, and to automate clinical evidence computing. They invent data-driven methods to optimize the inclusiveness and safety of clinical trial eligibility criteria for COVID-19 clinical trials. They discover knowledge of common clinical trial eligibility criteria from all the studies in ClinicalTrials.gov. They discover clinical trial recruitment success factors. They develop user-friendly software tools to help clinical trialists identify eligible study cohorts in the EHR data and help patients search for clinical trial studies with minimized information overload. They advance human phenotyping using clinical text combined with the Human Phenotype Ontology. They develop neuro-symbolic methods to automate medical evidence comprehension (making PubMed computable). They collaborate closely with clinical investigators, biostatisticians, rare disease experts, and translational researchers at CUIMC and beyond.

Weng is the fifth member of DBMI to be honored with the Lindberg Award, and the third in as many years. Noémie Elhadad earned the award in 2023, while Sarah Rossetti was honored in 2024. Carol Friedman (2010) and Jim Cimino (2012) are other past winners.

DBMI Faculty, Trainees Served As Presenters, Panelists Throughout AMIA

DBMI members were highly active throughout the week. Starting with Xuhai “Orson” Xu’s role as a Saturday panelist during The Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare, and continuing through Sarah Rossetti’s Wednesday presentation on “Translating Nursing Data into Computational Metrics: An Evaluation Guideline for Inpatient Intravenous and Subcutaneous Insulin Management,” Columbia’s influence could be felt often in Atlanta.

All presentations from the department can be found below.

SATURDAY

W12: The Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH)
Speaker: Xuhai “Orson” Xu

SP1: Student Paper Competition
Speaker: Hsin Yi “Cindy” Chen
Title: Knowledge Engineering for Medical Vocabularies Using Large Language Models

SP1: Student Paper Competition
Speaker: Rachel Lee
Title: Earlier ICU Transfer after CONCERN Early Warning System Score Escalation Reduced Sepsis-related Mortality: Results from a Multi-site Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

SUNDAY 

W24: Analysis of Human Interactive Behavior for Improving Patient Safety and Reducing Clinician Burnout in the AI Era
Speaker: Vimla Patel

S05: Ontologies and Knowledge Engineering in the Age of LLMs
Speaker: Hsin Yi “Cindy” Chen
Title: Knowledge Engineering for Medical Vocabularies Using Large Language Models

S07: The Data Multiverse: Exploring Parallel Health Realities for Comprehensive Insights
Speaker: Abigail Newbury
Title: Cross Biobank Comparison of Phenomic Profiles

Poster Session 1
Presenter: Yu-Hsiang “Johnny” Lo
Poster: P12: Detecting Deterioration: Qualitative Study of Emergency Department Communication Patterns

Presenters: Courtney Diamond, Temmi Daramola
Poster: P31: Development and Modifications to the CONCERN Implementation Toolkit

MONDAY

S15: Vital Signs: Making Nursing Work Visible, Measurable, and Impactful
Speaker: Varsha Varkhedi
Title: Translating Nursing Data into Computational Metrics: An Evaluation Guideline for Inpatient Intravenous and Subcutaneous Insulin Management

S26: Data Alchemy: Transforming Clinical Complexity into Actionable ML Intelligence
Speaker: Aparajita Kashyap
Title: Leveraging data-driven analyses to improve subpopulation robustness of a schizophrenia prediction model

S30: Collen Award Session – Comparable and Consistent Data: From ontologies and classifications to real-world data
Speaker: James Cimino

S39: The Fast and the Febrile: Racing Against Sepsis
Speaker: Rachel Lee
Title: Earlier ICU Transfer after CONCERN Early Warning System Score Escalation Reduced Sepsis-related Mortality: Results from a Multi-site Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

S46: DocuMental Load: Evaluating AI and Ambient Tech in Clinical Documentation
Speaker: Pinyue “Vicky” Wang
Title: Mapping Documentation Burden: Analyzing Centrality and Clusters among Flowsheet Measures and Templates Through Network Analysis

S46: DocuMental Load: Evaluating AI and Ambient Tech in Clinical Documentation
Speaker: James Baker
Title: Towards Automated Evaluation of Clinical Documentation Summarization Quality

S53: AMIA 2025 Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award Honoree Presentations
Moderator: Chunhua Weng

TUESDAY

LU09: The Impact of NIH Policy Changes on Journal Publication Practices and Sustainability
Speaker: Suzanne Bakken

S54: “Going the Last Mile” to Get Research Broadly Used: Interactive Panel with AHRQ Digital Healthcare Research Grantees Bridging the Gap
Panelist: Jason Adelman
Title: Translating Nursing Data into Computational Metrics: An Evaluation Guideline for Inpatient Intravenous and Subcutaneous Insulin Management

S58: The Drug Data Multiverse: Signals, Safety, and Sensitivity
Panelist: Anna Ostropolets
Title: Developing RxNorm Extension: A Step Toward Global Drug Data Harmonization in Observational Drug Research

S61: Prompt and Circumstance: Contextual Intelligence in the Age of LLMs
Panelist: Sachleen Tuteja
Title: Shifting Information Needs in Clinical Practice: The Evolving Role of Generative AI in Addressing Clinician Demands for Context-Specific Knowledge

State of the Association Meeting/Presentation of Signature and Leadership Awards
Honoree: Chunhua Weng (Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics)

Poster Session 3
Presenter: Hsin Yi “Cindy” Chen
Poster: P10: Correcting Informative Censoring in Treatment Effect Estimation with Large Scale, Real-World Health Data

Presenter: Lauren Richter
Poster: P181: HIV Acquisition After PrEP Initiation: Quantifying Opportunities for Long-Acting Injectable Interventions Using Large-Scale Observational Data

WEDNESDAY 

S98: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence, Simulated National Trials, and Implementation Science Methods to Advance Clinical Decision Support for Nurses
Panelist: Sarah Rossetti
Title: Translating Nursing Data into Computational Metrics: An Evaluation Guideline for Inpatient Intravenous and Subcutaneous Insulin Management

Closing Plenary Session, featuring Keynote by James Cimino, MD, FACMI, FACP, FAMIA: Year in Review
Presenter: James Cimino