HOBI welcomes new and returning faculty

The department of health outcomes & biomedical informatics (HOBI) extends a warm welcome—and welcome back—to our new and returning faculty members.

Fall 2019: Mathias Brochhausen, Ph.D., joined the biomedical informatics (BMI) team in September, and François Modave, Ph.D., rejoined the BMI team in December after spending a year at Loyola University in Chicago.

Spring 2020: In January, Chris Harle, Ph.D., joined the BMI team, and Georges Khalil, Ph.D., became a member of the health outcomes and implementation science team.

Welcome!

Mathias Brochhausen, Ph.D.

Photo of Mathias Brochhausen, Ph.D.
Mathias Brochhausen, Ph.D.

Brochhausen joined the BMI team as an associate professor in August, 2019. He also serves as the department’s associate director of education. Before joining the University of Florida, he was an associate professor and vice-chair for faculty development in the department of biomedical informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock. Before joining UAMS in 2011, he was a researcher at and manager of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science and executive director of the European Centre for Ontological Research, both at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research interests include semantic technologies, particularly knowledge representation and reasoning applied to clinical and clinical research data.

Brochhausen developed and co-developed multiple ontologies coded in Web Ontology Language (OWL), such as the Document Act Ontology (d-acts), the Ontology for Biobanking (OBIB), the Drug Ontology (DRON), Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), etc. He is currently completing work on the Ontology of Organizational Structures of Trauma systems and Trauma centers (OOSTT) as part of the Comparative Assessment Framework for Environments of Trauma Care (CAFÉ) project and continues to contribute to the Drug-drug Interaction and Drug-drug Evidence Ontology (DIDEO). He is beginning work on a new project to investigate patterns of temporal disease progression. He is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed publications, is an associate editor of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, has refereed over a dozen journals, and has served on numerous conference program committees.

 

François Modave, Ph.D.

Photo of Francois Modave
François Modave, Ph.D.

Modave rejoins HOBI and the biomedical informatics team after spending a little over a year as director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Informatics Research and founding chair of the department of health informatics and data science at Loyola University Chicago, where he also served as site-PI for the Chicago CTSA.  Modave first joined HOBI in 2015 and spent nearly 4 years on the BMI team as an associate professor until he moved to Chicago in November 2018.

Modave’s research focuses on the use of data science, decision theory, and mobile health to improve health outcomes, in particular for chronic conditions, and also to improve cancer screening rates. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

 

Chris Harle, Ph.D.

Photo of Dr. Harle
Chris Harle, Ph.D.

Harle, a health services and biomedical informatics researcher, joins the biomedical informatics team as a professor. He also serves as chief research information officer for UF Health. Before coming to UF and HOBI, he most recently served as an associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Indiana University’s Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health. In Indiana, he was also a research scientist in the Regenstrief Institute’s Center for Biomedical Informatics, associate faculty in the Kelley School of Business, and director of the Ph.D. program in health policy and management. Prior to joining Indiana, Harle was an assistant professor of health services research, management and policy at the University of Florida.

Harle’s research examines the role of information systems and technology in clinical care, health-related decision making, and biomedical research. At Florida and Indiana, Harle taught courses in Information Systems, Management Science, Operations Management, and Outcomes Research to masters and Ph.D. students. He holds an M.S. in decision and information sciences from the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration and a Ph.D. in information systems and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III College.

 

Georges Khalil, Ph.D.

Photo of Georges Khalil, Ph.D.
Georges Khalil, Ph.D.

Khalil is researcher and health communication specialist working on the design and evaluation of entertainment- and technology-based interventions that aim to improve clinical and behavioral health outcomes. Most recently, his research has focused on tobacco cessation among youth including ASPIRE, a web-based smoking prevention program for adolescents, and Project Debunk, a mobile health campaign for tobacco-risk communication among community college students.  He has also worked on Re-Mission, a video game to improve medication adherence among pediatric cancer patients and cancer-risk communication with young adults.

Khalil most recently served a postdoctoral associate at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He earned his doctoral degree in communication from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Master of Public Health in health communications from the University of Southern California.  He has received an Early Career Investigator Award from the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and a New Investigator Workshop Award from the American Society of Preventive Oncology.

Khalil joins the department with an NIH funded K99/R00 entitled: Social Influence Strategies during a Web-based Smoking Prevention Intervention for Adolescents.