Faculty Directory

Elizabeth Shenkman, PhD is the Chair of the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and also is the Co-Director of the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the Associate Director for Community Outreach and Engagement for the UF Health Cancer Center. Dr. Shenkman is a health outcomes researcher with a research focus on: 1) determining which combinations of health care delivery, community, and patient factors influence quality and outcomes of care; and 2) developing and testing corresponding evidence-based strategies to reduce disparities in health outcomes among underserved populations.

In her role as CTSI Co-Director and Co-Principle Investigator, Dr. Shenkman leads the Learning Health System initiative, including interfacing with clinicians, health system leaders, researchers, and patients to align research and clinical operations to systematically improve health outcomes and advance health equity using real world data combined with implementation and improvement science methodologies. In addition, Dr. Shenkman leads the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, which was developed through the CTSI.

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute-funded OneFlorida Clinical Research Network is comprised of 10 different health system partners caring for over 15 M Floridians or approximately 60% of the population in the 3rd largest state in the US. The Floridians in this network include vulnerable populations who are rarely or minimally included in traditional clinical trials (e.g., those of lower socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minorities, children, and older adults). A hallmark of OneFlorida is its centralized Data Trust, which contains linked health care claims, electronic health record, tumor registry, vital statistics, and census data from its health system partners for cohort discovery, study feasibility determination, and to augment primary data collection activities. Dr. Shenkman facilitates investigators’ access to OneFlorida clinical settings and the Data Trust for a wide range of studies including cancer-focused interventional trials.

Dr. Shenkman is an MPI for the NIH Office of the Director-funded All of Us Precision Medicine cohort initiative in collaboration with the University of Miami, Emory University and Morehouse School of Medicine. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing community engagement and recruitment and retention efforts focused on rural and underserved populations in North Florida. Dr. Shenkman also is the PI of an R01 funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality examining the effects of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals with chronic conditions. The project uses electronic health record data to better measure health care use and clinical outcomes for adults with T2 diabetes and/or hypertension and who have intersecting identities (e.g., women who are black and residing in rural areas).

Dr. Shenkman’s research is funded by PCORI, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, NIH, and the National Cancer Institute. Her work is published in such journals as Pediatrics, Health Services Research, Clinical Epidemiology, Pediatric Blood and Cancer, and the American Journal of Public Health. Dr. Shenkman is an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society.

Stephanie A. S. Staras, M.S.P.H., Ph.D., is a professor and Associate Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. She is also the Associate Director of the Institute for Child Health Policy and co-lead for the UFHealth Cancer Center’s Cancer Control and Population Science Program.

Dr. Staras is an expert in rigorous and impactful research in prevention of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancers and using implementation science methods to increase health equity. She focuses on improving the clinical recommendations for, parent receptiveness to, and access to HPV vaccines among adolescents within Florida. She has served as Principal Investigator on investigator-initiated National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded and foundation grants with total PI funding of over $11 million. Her large, high-enrolling projects contributed critically to the UF Cancer Center NCI designation by demonstrating the necessary impact in the catchment area and comprising 40% of UF’s clinical trial accruals in the past three years.

Dr. Staras is a recognized expert in implementation science research methods. Having graduated from the NCI-sponsored training program entitled “Mentored Training in Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer,” she applies her expertise to a broad range of research aimed to improve health equity. She has led and co-led implementation in a variety of areas: uptake of Meningitis B vaccination among high school and college students, developing an acceptable decision support tool to aid primary care physicians in preventing opioid overdose, increased enrollment of underrepresented populations in cancer clinical trials, understanding the role of dental practitioners in health risk assessments, and improving hypertension treatment with precision-based solutions.

I am Professor and Associate Chair of Education for the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics. I also serve as Assistant Director of the Cancer Training and Education Program for the UF Health Cancer Center. I am a behavioral scientist with international expertise in healthcare communication and medical education. My research focuses on the implementation of communication interventions for clinicians, patients, and caregivers to improve outcomes in areas such as cancer clinical trial accrual, HPV vaccination, dementia, and cancer treatment misinformation. I have received significant research funding from the National Institutes of Health and foundations such as The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I have published 190 peer-reviewed papers, co-edited two Oxford books on healthcare communication, and co-edited the Wiley International Encyclopedia of Health Communication. I also serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief of PEC Innovation, an open access sibling journal to Patient Education & Counseling.

I lead the department’s educational programs and am committed to ensuring that students receive training that will prepare them to help answer pressing health-related research questions. As an educator, I equip students with methodological skills that will enable them to pursue their research goals. As a mentor, my primary goal is to help my mentees fulfill their potential. I am a member of the UF College of Medicine’s Society for Teaching Scholars.

Biomedical Informatics is an interdisciplinary field, where the central theme is to explore the effective uses of data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem-solving, and decision making, motived by efforts to import human health. I have a diverse yet strong multi-disciplinary background in data integration, semantic web, machine learning, natural language processing, social media analysis, network science, data privacy, and software engineering. Nevertheless, my expertise and background serve an overarching theme: data science with heterogeneous data, information and knowledge resources.

I currently serve as the Chief Data Scientist and Chief Research Information Officer for UF Health, Division Chief of Biomedical Informatics in Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Biomedical Informatics Program for the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI; https://www.ctsi.ufl.edu/about/ctsi-programs/biomedical-informatics/), the Chief Data Scientist for the UF Health Cancer Center, and the Chief Data Scientist for the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Consortium (https://onefloridaconsortium.org/).

Since the start of my career, I’ve pursued contributing knowledge on a gerontological understanding of mobility deficits during the aging process and impact resulting from health events in late-life. I have a wealth of experience conducting both observational studies and clinical trials involving frail and low functioning older adults (minority and non-minority) that will support the organization, administration, planning, compliance, standardization, documentation, monitoring and reporting activities in the current study. As an added asset, I am or have been a key part of several consortia that involve behavioral modifications (UO1 AG022376, U01 AG048270), medication/neutriceutical (U01 AG050499), and body composition (U01 AG15013) studies that overlap operational and scientific elements of the current work. I am also actively leading or have led numerous government-sponsored studies that have strong connections to the ROAMM infrastructure (SBIR 261201500014C, R21 AG031974, UO1 AG022376, U01 AG050499, and R01 HL121023). I feel well qualified and I’m excited to undertake the responsibilities of being a co-investigator on this important study.

I currently serve as the Co-Director of the University of Florida’s Claude D. Pepper Older American’s Independence Center (OAIC) and the Director of the T32 Translational Research on Aging and Mobility (TRAM – T32 AG062728) program. I serve as a Professor and Division Chief of Clinical and Population Health Integration in The Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. Lastly, I am the Co-Leader of the Data Science and Applied Technology Core of the UF OAIC. In these roles, I lead an interdisciplinary team of investigators, staff and trainees. I currently lead both clinical trials and observational studies involving cognitive and physical impairments in older adults. In these studies, besides conducting rigorous science, I manage staff, oversee the finances, ensure regulatory compliance, monitor measurement standardization, and report data and safety information for these programs. I involve trainees at all levels for them to gain an appreciation of not just the science methods, but the overall operations of managing a complex primary data collection research program. I also preach rigorous data collection procedures and transparency throughout the scientific process. As an added asset, I am or was a key part of several consortia that involve behavioral modifications (UO1 AG022376, U01 AG048270), medication/nutraceutical (U01 AG050499), body composition (U01 AG15013) studies that encompass both operational and scientific elements that are matched to career development goals. My collaborative nature and diverse experiences have prepared me well to closely integrate with the team while being conscience of timely deliverables.

I’ve mentored or coached 42 men and women at various stages of their careers (post-doctoral fellows, pre-doctoral students and faculty). I also currently serve as a co-primary mentor and co-mentor of post-doctoral fellows in the T32 TRAM program in which I am Principal Investigator. In the past 5 years, I’ve served as the primary mentor of six post-doctoral fellows, one of which remain an active part of our research team. I’ve served as the primary or co-primary mentor for six doctoral students, five of which have subsequently gone on to either tenure-track faculty positions or post-doctoral positions. Of note, one of my recent doctoral students was accepted at John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was recently promoted to a faculty position in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Another formal doctoral student, who worked as part of our core, is currently employed at Google’s research and development team. My goal for these advanced scientists is to train and instill the Gerontological philosophies— preservation of function in conjunction with chronic disease management— to a variety of researchers and practitioners in health-related disciplines. As such, I mentor them on how to incorporate gerontology and geriatrics measures into their domain.

Dr. Salloum is a Professor and the Director of the Division of Implementation Science and Health Interventions in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Salloum also serves as the Associate Director of Community Outreach and Engagement at the UF Health Cancer Center and the Director of the Learning Health System Program at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Dr. Salloum’s research focuses on the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices, especially in cancer prevention and control. He has a demonstrated research record in the area of health services research across diverse health system and policy settings, with a particular focus on the implementation of evidence-based programs. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Florida Department of Health, the International Development Research Centre, and Cancer Research UK. Dr. Salloum is well-versed in implementation science methods and frameworks and has served as faculty for the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (TIDIRC).

Dr. Salloum teaches Fundamentals of Dissemination and Implementation Research (GMS 6851).

Biomedical Informatics is an interdisciplinary field, where the central theme is to explore the effective uses of data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem-solving, and decision making, motived by efforts to import human health. I have a diverse yet strong multi-disciplinary background in data integration, semantic web, machine learning, natural language processing, social media analysis, network science, data privacy, and software engineering. Nevertheless, my expertise and background serve an overarching theme: data science with heterogeneous data, information and knowledge resources.

I currently serve as the Chief Data Scientist and Chief Research Information Officer for UF Health, Division Chief of Biomedical Informatics in Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Biomedical Informatics Program for the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI; https://www.ctsi.ufl.edu/about/ctsi-programs/biomedical-informatics/), the Chief Data Scientist for the UF Health Cancer Center, and the Chief Data Scientist for the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Consortium (https://onefloridaconsortium.org/).

Dr. Gregory is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, Faculty Liaison for Research IT Builds for the Office of Data Science & Research Implementation (ODSRI), and Co-Director of the eHealth Core for the Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (CISR).

Her research seeks to study and improve health care safety and quality via clinical informatics tools (including the electronic health record [EHR], mHealth and eHealth, telehealth, and simulation-based training & virtual reality) with a particular focus around improving healthcare teamwork and patient-provider collaboration. She is passionate about collecting and using primary data to supplement real-world data (RWD; e.g., EHR data) in order to fully realize these goals. Her methodological expertise is primarily around the development and validation of survey measures, meta-analysis, and qualitative and user-centered design methods. She has served as Co-Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator on numerous funded projects, including from AHRQ, NIH, and Ohio Department of Medicaid grants and contracts. She is highly involved in the international Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), where she serves as Program Chair for the Health Care Technical Group and is on the Editorial Board for the Human Factors in Healthcare Journal.

Dr. Gregory holds a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida, and completed an Advanced Fellowship in Health Professions Education, Evaluation and Research at the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness & Safety with the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Guo serves as the Director of the Cancer Informatics Shared Resource and the Associate Director of the Cancer Quantitative Sciences Division for the UF Health Cancer Center. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Office of Data Science Research for the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network.

Dr. Guo has a multi-disciplinary background in the analysis of real-world data such as those from electronic health records (EHRs) and administrative claims, randomized trial and observational study design, predictive modeling (e.g., statistical and machine learning), causal modeling, and the analysis of patient-reported outcomes (PROs).

Together, Dr. Guo’s areas of expertise serve an overarching research theme: generating real-world evidence to support healthcare decision-making for disease prevention and control. Under this overarching theme, Dr. Guo’s research areas and expertise can be divided into three key methodologies: (1) EHR-based phenotyping and risk stratification – the identification of sub-populations with certain conditions or at higher risk for diseases, (2) Causal modeling and inference – the examination of causal relationships and pathways in clinical research, particularly treatment studies, and (3) PROs in clinical and public health applications – the development, validation, assessment, analysis, and reporting of PROs among various populations, especially vulnerable populations.

Dr. Liu is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Director of Predictive Analytics and Associate Director of Graduate Education in HOBI.

Dr. Liu received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kansas and completed her National Library of Medicine (NLM) postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. Her research interest in bioinformatics began during her doctoral study with the development of novel machine learning algorithms to improve prediction of protein-protein interactions and protein functions. Her research interest expanded to medical informatics while at Vanderbilt with the development of machine learning models to detect and predict adverse drug reactions using electronic health records (EHRs). Her other research interests include the secondary use of EHR data to model patient risks and disease trajectory and discover underlying risk factors.

Dr. Liu’s current research focus is on the development of novel machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to accelerate risk factor identification and discovery in medicine using EHR data. Clinical applications of her research include adverse drug reaction, diabetic kidney disease, acute kidney injury (AKI), and sepsis predictions. She is the Principal Investigator for a NIDDK R01 project and an NSF Smart and Connected Health project that focus on the identification of personalized risk factors of AKI with personalized modeling and causal learning and building a secure and robust AKI prediction model with privacy-preserving federated transfer learning using EHR data from 11 PCORnet sites across 9 states.

Dr. Mardini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida (UF). He is a trained computer scientist and engineer with research expertise in applied artificial intelligence and wearable technology in healthcare

Professor Muller has external research funding from a variety of federal and state agencies. His more than 150 peer-reviewed journal publications are split roughly equally between scientific collaborations and biostatistical methodology developments. In addition, Professor Muller is the first author of two books on the theory and practice of linear models. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

With funding from a series of NIH grants, Professor Muller serves as co-principal investigator in collaboration with Dr. D. H. Glueck (University of Colorado Denver Medical School) for the development of GLIMMPSE software and the website SampleSizeShop.org. The site includes a free online short course on design, power and sample size for studies with multilevel (clustering) and longitudinal dimensions. The site also includes free and open-source software, GLIMMPSE, that requires only a web browser to compute power and sample size for multilevel and longitudinal designs.

Dr. Rahman is interested in building tools to democratize data science, with a focus on empowering domain experts in healthcare. Her research spans the disciplines of data science, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction in domains of infectious diseases and cancer. Dr. Rahman’s overarching goal is to bridge the gap between data science and domain experts. To this end, her Ph.D. thesis presented a framework to amplify expertise in clinical data pipelines while her postdoctoral work aimed to automate data extraction from unstructured texts such as EHR notes and biomedical literature. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Ohio State University in August 2020 and completed her postdoctoral training in Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Ray is interested in how technology can support clinical and patient decision-making in the complex socio-technical healthcare delivery system. She brings expertise in leading observations in the clinical setting, qualitative interviews, physiologic measurement of stress and workload, complex system process improvement and design, and studying system impacts on human performance including decision making. She joins the University of Florida after four years as a faculty member in Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine where she supported a variety of simulation educational programs and research in the areas of clinician stress, decision-support, and teams. Prior to returning to academia and research, she worked as a simulation learning consultant for Yale-New Haven Health where she facilitated interprofessional groups working on process improvement efforts across a variety of clinical settings including supporting simulation-based design sessions for the Yale Center for Healthcare Innovation, Redesign and Learning’s (CHIRAL) work on care transitions. During her graduate training, she worked as a graduate research fellow studying technology-based adaptive training methods for complex cognitive skill development. Dr. Ray has extensive experience in design facilitation, holds a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification, and is a TeamSTEPPS master instructor. Her current work focuses on how we can better understand and support clinician decision-making and patient-clinician interactions through informatics and technology-based interventions.

Dr. Qianqian Song is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Director of Translational Bioinformatics in the UFHCC Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (CISR) and the UF CTSI Biomedical Informatics program.

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science (specializing in Machine and Deep Learning, focused on Few-Shot Learning and Representation Learning) and a medical degree. During medical school, I conducted research projects involving Geriatric Medicine. During my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, I collaborated with biomedical scientists and clinicians across various medical specialties, demonstrating data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) research and its effects on mild cognitive impairment and dementia.

My work aims to: 1) Facilitate cost-effective clinical trials using natural language processing (NLP) and computable electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping methods. 2) Advance automated precision medicine from an individual perspective by leveraging clinical big data, including EHRs, time-series data, imaging, and blood-based measures. Using novel machine learning and AI techniques to identify individuals at high risk of disease.

The ultimate goal is to develop therapies that promote healthy aging through translational AI.

Dr. Yonghui Wu is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. He also serves as the Director of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. Dr. Wu’s research interests include natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, computational drug repurposing, and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to electronic health records for clinical and translational research. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and has been the principal investigator for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. from the Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science with a focus on natural language processing. Then, he entered medical informatics research with a motivation to help improve the quality of healthcare delivery and the safety of patients. He has Biomedical informatics training at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

My research interests are focused on the intersection of machine learning and health informatics, with a particular emphasis on disease progression subtyping, predictive modeling, and federated learning techniques. Prior to joining UF, I conducted postdoctoral research at Weill Cornell Medicine, working closely with Dr. Fei Wang and Dr. Jyotishman Pathak. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Xidian University in 2018, during which I participated in a joint doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Arlington from 2016 to 2018. I am enthusiastic about continuing my research at UF and contributing to healthcare advancement through innovative machine learning approaches.

My research mainly focuses on applying and developing machine learning approaches (CNN, RNN, GNN, Transformer, etc.) and protein language models to address biomedical problems, especially in (1) RNA virus and infectious diseases, e.g., mutation and variant identification, viral antigenicity and virulence prediction; (2) rare disease study, e.g., variant pathogenicity prediction and gene prioritization; (3) cancer study, e.g., miRNA-mRNA target identification in colorectal cancer patients and renal tumor classification, (4) Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD), e.g., computational drug repurposing for AD/ADRD; and (5) Health equity, e.g., identify social determinants of health that impact healthy aging people.

Dr. Kaufmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is a public health researcher with interests at the intersection of aging, sleep, and health services research. His research focuses on using epidemiologic data to identify patterns in use of health services for sleep disorders among older adults and examining how such patterns affect trajectories of aging (e.g., cognitive decline and neurodegeneration) across the life course.

Dominick Lemas is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. Dr. Lemas received his bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Vermont in 2006 and completed his doctorate in biochemistry & molecular biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2012. His research is devoted to understanding the fetal origins of pediatric obesity with a specific interest in the functional implications of gut microflora and the critical host-microbe interactions that regulate maternal-infant metabolism.

Since the start of my career, I’ve pursued contributing knowledge on a gerontological understanding of mobility deficits during the aging process and impact resulting from health events in late-life. I have a wealth of experience conducting both observational studies and clinical trials involving frail and low functioning older adults (minority and non-minority) that will support the organization, administration, planning, compliance, standardization, documentation, monitoring and reporting activities in the current study. As an added asset, I am or have been a key part of several consortia that involve behavioral modifications (UO1 AG022376, U01 AG048270), medication/neutriceutical (U01 AG050499), and body composition (U01 AG15013) studies that overlap operational and scientific elements of the current work. I am also actively leading or have led numerous government-sponsored studies that have strong connections to the ROAMM infrastructure (SBIR 261201500014C, R21 AG031974, UO1 AG022376, U01 AG050499, and R01 HL121023). I feel well qualified and I’m excited to undertake the responsibilities of being a co-investigator on this important study.

I currently serve as the Co-Director of the University of Florida’s Claude D. Pepper Older American’s Independence Center (OAIC) and the Director of the T32 Translational Research on Aging and Mobility (TRAM – T32 AG062728) program. I serve as a Professor and Division Chief of Clinical and Population Health Integration in The Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. Lastly, I am the Co-Leader of the Data Science and Applied Technology Core of the UF OAIC. In these roles, I lead an interdisciplinary team of investigators, staff and trainees. I currently lead both clinical trials and observational studies involving cognitive and physical impairments in older adults. In these studies, besides conducting rigorous science, I manage staff, oversee the finances, ensure regulatory compliance, monitor measurement standardization, and report data and safety information for these programs. I involve trainees at all levels for them to gain an appreciation of not just the science methods, but the overall operations of managing a complex primary data collection research program. I also preach rigorous data collection procedures and transparency throughout the scientific process. As an added asset, I am or was a key part of several consortia that involve behavioral modifications (UO1 AG022376, U01 AG048270), medication/nutraceutical (U01 AG050499), body composition (U01 AG15013) studies that encompass both operational and scientific elements that are matched to career development goals. My collaborative nature and diverse experiences have prepared me well to closely integrate with the team while being conscience of timely deliverables.

I’ve mentored or coached 42 men and women at various stages of their careers (post-doctoral fellows, pre-doctoral students and faculty). I also currently serve as a co-primary mentor and co-mentor of post-doctoral fellows in the T32 TRAM program in which I am Principal Investigator. In the past 5 years, I’ve served as the primary mentor of six post-doctoral fellows, one of which remain an active part of our research team. I’ve served as the primary or co-primary mentor for six doctoral students, five of which have subsequently gone on to either tenure-track faculty positions or post-doctoral positions. Of note, one of my recent doctoral students was accepted at John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was recently promoted to a faculty position in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Another formal doctoral student, who worked as part of our core, is currently employed at Google’s research and development team. My goal for these advanced scientists is to train and instill the Gerontological philosophies— preservation of function in conjunction with chronic disease management— to a variety of researchers and practitioners in health-related disciplines. As such, I mentor them on how to incorporate gerontology and geriatrics measures into their domain.

My research is largely focused on the effects that dietary composition has on the modulation of the pain experience, specifically through epigenetic and immune mechanisms. With that in mind, I have dealt with a variety of painful conditions and pathologies (i.e. chronic low back pain, knee osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia etc.) and understanding of nutrient status and their effects on the system at a variety of ages (i.e. inflammation and oxidative stress). My areas of expertise include nutritional biochemistry, pain medicine, neuroscience, and epigenetics. My experience crosses borders, having basic science, clinical science, and epidemiological opportunities over the course of my doctoral and postdoctoral training. My PhD work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB; PI: Dr. Robert Sorge) employed the use of nutritive models to identify factors that may contribute substantially to the development and perpetuation of chronic pain, with an emphasis on sex, gender and racial disparities therein. I have extensive experimental skills in the acquisition, protocol design and execution, and analyses of a variety of nutrition-based models (i.e. diet pattern analysis, nutrient analysis, Dietary Inflammatory Index) in humans and rodents. I have advanced theoretical and practical skills in designing, implementing and analyzing various neuroscience-based pain-related measures. My doctoral training gave me extensive experience in the use of dynamic quantitative sensory testing, as well as experience investigating blood-based inflammatory and oxidative stress mediators and standardized measures of psychosocial assessment. At the University of Florida (UF; PI: Dr. Yenisel Cruz-Almeida), my postdoctoral tenure afforded me a unique opportunity to employ my research skills related to nutri-biological and psychosocial pain phenotyping in an aging population and to expand the existing body of literature specific to epigenetic and neuroscientific pain-related mechanisms. My current research interests center around understanding the nutriepigenomic mechanisms that contribute to the pain experience observed in various types of acute and chronic pain. Additionally, I am also interested in how the nutriepigenomic/pain relationship impacts cognition and the development of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease over time. To that end, I received the prestigious K99/R00 Pathways to Independence Award from the National Instute on Aging. The K99 phase of the project revealed significant associations of nutrition status with pain and disability outcomes, as well as cognitive functioning. My research endeavors moving forward aim to include individuals with mild cognitive impairment to observe associations in this group between pain, nutrition, metabolomics, and epigenetics. My long-term goal is to combine nutriepigeneomic approaches to develop a program of research investigating the mechanisms, prevention, and treatment strategies through nutritional avenues to combat comorbid chronic pain and cognitive disease as one ages.

I am Professor and Associate Chair of Education for the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics. I also serve as Assistant Director of the Cancer Training and Education Program for the UF Health Cancer Center. I am a behavioral scientist with international expertise in healthcare communication and medical education. My research focuses on the implementation of communication interventions for clinicians, patients, and caregivers to improve outcomes in areas such as cancer clinical trial accrual, HPV vaccination, dementia, and cancer treatment misinformation. I have received significant research funding from the National Institutes of Health and foundations such as The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I have published 190 peer-reviewed papers, co-edited two Oxford books on healthcare communication, and co-edited the Wiley International Encyclopedia of Health Communication. I also serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief of PEC Innovation, an open access sibling journal to Patient Education & Counseling.

I lead the department’s educational programs and am committed to ensuring that students receive training that will prepare them to help answer pressing health-related research questions. As an educator, I equip students with methodological skills that will enable them to pursue their research goals. As a mentor, my primary goal is to help my mentees fulfill their potential. I am a member of the UF College of Medicine’s Society for Teaching Scholars.

Carla L. Fisher, Ph.D. is a Professor in Implementation Science and Health Interventions and affiliate of the UF Health Cancer Center and Center for Arts in Medicine. She is a behavioral scientist and expert in family-centered psychosocial oncology care, qualitative designs in implementation science, and building lifespan/developmentally targeted interventions using narrative-grounded mixed- methods research.

Dr. Fisher’s work aims to contribute to a “psychosocial map” that helps patients, caregivers, family members, and clinicians learn communication skills central to promoting healthier outcomes when coping with acute or chronic illnesses, family caregiving, and disease risk. Her primary focus has been on promoting family-centered psychosocial oncology care from pre-diagnosis through survivorship with much of this focused on improving care in breast cancer and blood cancers. Her work in family- or patient-centered healthcare has also spanned numerous healthcare contexts (e.g., diabetes, acupuncture, mental health, geriatric medicine, genomic medicine, hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risk). She also prioritizes reducing health disparities for women, racial/ethnic minorities, veterans, the aging, adolescents and young adults (AYAs), and individuals living with hereditary disease risk. Collectively, her work brings to the forefront the importance of family communication in healthcare practice and public health interventions.

Dr. Fisher is also an expert in multi-method qualitative designs in implementation science. She is regularly invited to serve as the lead qualitative expert on grant-funded research supported by funders like NIH, PCORI, DOD, and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She’s been an invited qualitative expert for the government including the National United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Office on Women’s Health (OWH), and for five years, served as the lead qualitative methodologist on multiple funded projects for the Military Primary Care Research Network. She currently directs a team of qualitative scientists who lead the qualitative arms of multiple funded studies and teaches a summer advanced graduate course in qualitative design and thematic analysis.

Her research collaborations have resulted in more than $15 million in federal and private funding and she’s authored >100 publications. This includes the only nationally recognized, evidence-informed book (Coping together, side by side), which addresses the central role of mother-daughter communication to breast cancer coping and caregiving and offers narrative-driven guidance targeting women’s distinct developmental needs. Across her career she has had the privilege of mentoring 66 graduate students and multiple early career MDs and PhDs on their paths to independent investigators.

As a medical geographer, I contribute to a variety of health outcomes studies, and to the larger initiatives of the department and college. Due to my diverse background in spatial technologies and experience with environmental data, I contribute to a variety of community health and heath policy related research, both in geographic analyses and geographic data management. My research provides insight into the rurality and other spatial trends of patient data that is vital to several initiatives of the UF Cancer Center, Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, several large Medicaid Managed Care evaluation projects, and multiple studies using data from the OneFlorida Clinical Data Research Network. My contributions include working with researchers on study design, managing the process of geocoding (generating spatial locations from written address data) multiple large data sources, analyses of health care network adequacy, hotspot identification, cluster analyses, and creation of new spatial data sets.

Georges Khalil is a cancer prevention scientist and health communication specialist in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. Prior to his appointment at the University of Florida, Dr. Khalil served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Instructor faculty at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He earned a Master of Public Health from the University of Southern California (2010) and a Doctoral degree in Communication from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2015).

Dr. Khalil’s research interests are cancer prevention, digital technologies, and social interactivity. His work primarily focuses on the design and evaluation of entertainment programs and technology-based interventions that aim to improve clinical and behavioral outcomes related to cancer prevention and control among youths. He is particularly passionate about the application of games for health to bring about behavior change.

Most recently, his research has focused on tobacco prevention, exploring adolescents’ reactions to ASPIRE, a web-based smoking prevention program, and the study of young adults’ experience with a mobile health campaign for tobacco-risk communication. He has also conducted studies on Re-Mission, a video game designed to improve medication adherence among pediatric cancer patients and cancer-risk communication among young-adult college students. Funded by an R00 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Khalil is currently developing and testing social influence strategies for tobacco prevention and cessation among adolescents.

Dr. Khalil has presented at both national and international conferences including the World Cancer Congress and has been recipient of a variety of awards including the 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.

Dr. LeLaurin is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the Learning Health System Program at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and co-leads the Tobacco Control Working Group at the University of Florida Cancer Center. Dr. LeLaurin has a background in implementation science and public health along with over ten years of experience working in tobacco control. She specializes in using qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to support the implementation of technology-based interventions in clinical settings. Her research focuses on leveraging the EHR to improve adherence to clinical practice guidelines for tobacco dependence treatment. She is also interested in developing and testing EHR-based strategies for social risk screening and interventions.

Dr. Mkuu is a health outcomes and chronic disease researcher in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. Dr. Mkuu’s work focuses on disentangling determinants of health outcomes and identifying evidenced-interventions and policies that improve the health of under-served populations.

Dr. Salloum is a Professor and the Director of the Division of Implementation Science and Health Interventions in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Salloum also serves as the Associate Director of Community Outreach and Engagement at the UF Health Cancer Center and the Director of the Learning Health System Program at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Dr. Salloum’s research focuses on the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices, especially in cancer prevention and control. He has a demonstrated research record in the area of health services research across diverse health system and policy settings, with a particular focus on the implementation of evidence-based programs. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Florida Department of Health, the International Development Research Centre, and Cancer Research UK. Dr. Salloum is well-versed in implementation science methods and frameworks and has served as faculty for the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (TIDIRC).

Dr. Salloum teaches Fundamentals of Dissemination and Implementation Research (GMS 6851).

Elizabeth Shenkman, PhD is the Chair of the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and also is the Co-Director of the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the Associate Director for Community Outreach and Engagement for the UF Health Cancer Center. Dr. Shenkman is a health outcomes researcher with a research focus on: 1) determining which combinations of health care delivery, community, and patient factors influence quality and outcomes of care; and 2) developing and testing corresponding evidence-based strategies to reduce disparities in health outcomes among underserved populations.

In her role as CTSI Co-Director and Co-Principle Investigator, Dr. Shenkman leads the Learning Health System initiative, including interfacing with clinicians, health system leaders, researchers, and patients to align research and clinical operations to systematically improve health outcomes and advance health equity using real world data combined with implementation and improvement science methodologies. In addition, Dr. Shenkman leads the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, which was developed through the CTSI.

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute-funded OneFlorida Clinical Research Network is comprised of 10 different health system partners caring for over 15 M Floridians or approximately 60% of the population in the 3rd largest state in the US. The Floridians in this network include vulnerable populations who are rarely or minimally included in traditional clinical trials (e.g., those of lower socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minorities, children, and older adults). A hallmark of OneFlorida is its centralized Data Trust, which contains linked health care claims, electronic health record, tumor registry, vital statistics, and census data from its health system partners for cohort discovery, study feasibility determination, and to augment primary data collection activities. Dr. Shenkman facilitates investigators’ access to OneFlorida clinical settings and the Data Trust for a wide range of studies including cancer-focused interventional trials.

Dr. Shenkman is an MPI for the NIH Office of the Director-funded All of Us Precision Medicine cohort initiative in collaboration with the University of Miami, Emory University and Morehouse School of Medicine. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing community engagement and recruitment and retention efforts focused on rural and underserved populations in North Florida. Dr. Shenkman also is the PI of an R01 funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality examining the effects of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals with chronic conditions. The project uses electronic health record data to better measure health care use and clinical outcomes for adults with T2 diabetes and/or hypertension and who have intersecting identities (e.g., women who are black and residing in rural areas).

Dr. Shenkman’s research is funded by PCORI, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, NIH, and the National Cancer Institute. Her work is published in such journals as Pediatrics, Health Services Research, Clinical Epidemiology, Pediatric Blood and Cancer, and the American Journal of Public Health. Dr. Shenkman is an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society.