Three instructors from the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics were honored by the College of Medicine with a 2025 Exemplary Teacher Award. They are:
- Professor Carla Fisher, Ph.D., M.S.W.
- Associate Professor Megan Gregory Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor Larissa Strath, Ph.D.
The three instructors represent the department’s three divisions.
The College of Medicine selects a maximum of 10 percent of its faculty who were nominated for this accolade. Department chair Elizabeth Shenkman, Ph.D., made the nominations for HOBI.
Exemplary teachers in the College of Medicine are selected based on their teaching excellence of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and mentorship of junior faculty.
Division of Implementation Science and Health Interventions
Carla Fisher is a professor and an affiliate of the UF Health Cancer Institute, Center for Arts in Medicine, and the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases. Fisher holds a master’s degree in clinical social work from Florida State University and a doctorate from The Pennsylvania State University, where she also had a predoctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Aging.
Fisher is an expert in developing family-centered health interventions with a specialty in qualitative design in implementation science. Her summer course provides students with immersive training in “Qualitative Inquiry and Analysis in Intervention Development and Implementation.” She is currently the principal investigator of studies funded by Blood Cancer United and the Florida Department of Health to implement supportive care for family caregivers in oncology and dementia care.
Fisher also recently won a UF Faculty Enhancement Opportunity award for spring of 2026.
Division of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
Megan Gregory is an associate professor of biomedical informatics, faculty liaison for the UF Integrated Data Repository Research Services, and the director of the eHealth Core Cancer Informatics Shared Resource in the UF Health Cancer Institute. Gregory holds a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida.
Recent courses offered were “Security and Privacy in Clinical Research,” “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis in Clinical, Health Services Research and Public Health,” and a 3-week clinical informatics module in “Foundations of Biomedical Informatics.”
Gregory is an expert in the use of digital health to improve collaboration and patient care. Core research methods include the development and validation of survey measures, meta-analysis, and qualitative and user-centered designs. Gregory is currently the principal investigator on a research project funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Division of Clinical and Population Health Integration
Larissa Strath is an assistant professor who studies the connections between diet and pain. Strath spent two years at UF as a postdoctoral associate and earned a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Alabama.
Her translational research approach spans the scientific continuum, from basic science to ongoing clinical projects. Her research aims to understand how nutrition can impact the relationship between pain and aging through metabolic and epigenetic mechanisms.
Courses taught recently have included “Pragmatic Clinical Trials” and “Science and Clinical Management of Dental Pain.”
These three instructors follow in the footsteps of last year’s Exemplary Teacher honorees from HOBI, who also represented the three divisions: Mei Liu, Ph.D.; Jennifer LeLaurin, Ph.D., and Chris Kaufmann, Ph.D.