The VERITY Bioinformatics Resource Core Team
Director: Katherine Liao, MD, MPH
Dr. Liao is a rheumatologist and clinical investigator. The clinical focus of her research examines clinical and genetic risk factors associated with cardiovascular co-morbidities in rheumatoid arthritis. As well, her team specializes in developing and applying approaches to effectively utilize electronic health records for clinical research.
Soumya Raychaudhuri, MD, PhD
Dr. Raychaudhuri is the Director for the BWH Center for Data Sciences, and he is also an Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He holds additional appointments at the Broad Institute and the University of Manchester. He leads an NIH funded research program focused on the use of human genetics and genomics in rheumatoid arthritis, type I diabetes, and tuberculosis.
Tianrun Cai, MD
Dr. Cai has medical doctor background and he has been a researcher on bioinformatic area at BWH and VA Boston Health System for a few years. He developed natural language processing tools for data extraction to perform clinical outcomes research and disease classification. Incorporating natural language processing and machine learning techniques, he also developed GUI software for note selection and chart review.
Kumar Dahal, MS
Kumar is working as a programmer analyst in the Department of Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since April 2018. He earned his MS in Computer Science from University of Memphis, Tennessee. Prior to joining Brigham, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Cotiviti where he was mainly involved in modeling, processing and analyzing US Healthcare data. His primary interests include Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) data, analyzing electronic healthcare data, features extraction and selection for statistical models, applying NLP to extract useful information, and machine learning. In his free time, he enjoys travelling to different places and study about society, culture and lifestyle of people.
Mary Jeffway
Mary is working in the Department of Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where she coordinates rheumatoid arthritis clinical trials. She earned her BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with friends and family, doing Crossfit, and being outdoors.
Harrison Zhang
Harrison Zhang is a researcher in the Division of Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He contributes to rheumatoid arthritis clinical studies and develops computational approaches to extract knowledge from electronic health records. He is a graduate of Columbia University. In his free time, he enjoys trying new restaurants, oil painting, and writing.
Tianxi Cai, ScD
Harvard Catalyst Profile
Dr. Tianxi Cai is a professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health and a professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. She received her Doctoral degree from Harvard in 1999 and taught at the University of Washington for two years before returning to Harvard as a faculty. Dr. Cai’s current research focuses mainly in the areas of risk prediction and personalized medicine with biomarkers and genomic studies; statistical and machine learning, analysis of EHR data.
Jing Cui, PhD
Jing Cui is the lead statistician in Section of Clinical Sciences in the Division of Rheumatology. Her current research focus is the application of statistical genetics to the study of RA, Lupus and Gout. She also interested in the genetic predictors of quantitative traits in RA. Dr. Cui supervises statistical programmers and data management activities, helps lead the Biometry Core, which serves the Section of Clinical Sciences and other members of the research community, consults, and performs analyses on a variety of clinical and basic science studies.
Chuan Hong, PhD
Chuan Hong received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School. Her research interests lie in developing statistical and computational methods for predictive modeling, biomarker evaluation and precision medicine with biomedical data. In particular, she is interested in combining electronic medical records with biorepositories and relevant resources to improve phenotyping accuracy, detect novel biomarkers, and monitor disease progression in clinical research.
Andrew Cagan, BS
A data scientist for Partners Healthcare since 2012, Andrew has collaborated with researchers on a variety of key projects including i2b2, eMerge, PENTACON, the All Payors Claim Database, and the Partners Healthcare Biobank Portal. Prior to arriving at Partners, Andrew worked at Statusone Health Systems, and later Healthways, Inc., analyzing EMR and health insurance data while creating and improving a variety of disease management algorithms. A self proclaimed chesspert (chess expert), in his spare time Mr.Cagan can be found discussing theology with his two English Bulldogs and walking amongst his home’s exquisitely manicured gardens, practicing politics with the many marble statues that were specifically created to bare his likeness.
Dana Weisenfeld, MS
Dana is a Research Scientist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Prior to joining the Brigham, she was a Research Assistant at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University where she primarily helped design and analyze randomized control trials aimed at improving PK-12 student attendance. She holds an MS in Applied Statistics from New York University.