Leigh Anne Tang, a Ph.D. student studying biomedical informatics, is the 2024 Brighter Ventures awardee.
The Brighter Ventures Student Award, established by Laurent Audoly, PhD’97, and Olga Granaturova, president of the Brighter Ventures nonprofit organization, supports Ph.D. students interested in the application of artificial intelligence in the biomedical research field.
Tang has been a predictive modeling intern with the Tennessee Department of Health since 2022 and is currently working on her dissertation, “Predictive Modeling for Opioid-Related Overdose Prevention: Towards Safer Opioid Prescribing and Guiding Treatment Selection for Opioid Use Disorder” in the lab of Dr. Colin Walsh, associate professor of biomedical informatics.
“Leigh Anne’s current work and planned projects combine the best of biomedical informatics and precision medicine, as she has developed a stellar portfolio of quantitative methods,” Walsh said. “She is an absolute delight to work with and has become a key member of the lab in terms of her willingness to teach and help others. She has a remarkable stable of skills already: predictive modeling, genetic analysis, phenotyping, natural language processing. But her goals are to implement and translate health care AI to have maximum impact.”
Tang’s research addresses the opioid epidemic through two interrelated projects: one at the patient level and the other at the public health level. At the patient level, individuals with opioid use disorder are at an increased risk for overdose. Medications are the first line of treatment for OUD, yet only 25 percent of individuals with OUD reported taking medication in 2022. To help increase medication initiation rates, Tang is developing a predictive model that uses clinical data from Vanderbilt University Medical Center to inform treatment selection for OUD. While developing this model, Tang interviewed clinicians to understand factors that might impact whether the model would be used at the point of care.
At the public health level, the State of Tennessee has been heavily impacted by the overdose epidemic, recording the third highest overdose death rate in 2022. Tang is working in tandem with the Tennessee Department of Health to develop AI solutions for overdose risk assessment, with the goal of informing public health interventions for the ongoing overdose crisis. She is the first Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt to work with the state on this type of collaboration.
“I am honored to receive the Brighter Ventures Award and to have an opportunity to shine a light on the ongoing overdose epidemic,” Tang said. “I am incredibly grateful for the mentorship of esteemed faculty members like Drs. Colin Walsh, Jessica Ancker, and Kim Unertl, as well as the unwavering commitment of Vanderbilt University Women in Science & Engineering to empowering women in science and engineering.”
“We are excited to be partnering with Vanderbilt University’s world-class ecosystem to continue building recognition for cutting-edge work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and life sciences and advancing important societal opportunities for all,” said Granaturova. “We are delighted to see trainees like Leigh Anne being recognized for important contributions in addressing pressing healthcare challenges.”
Tang received her M.S. in biomedical informatics from Vanderbilt in 2022 and her B.S. in statistics from the University of Notre Dame, graduating cum laude, in 2018. Before starting her graduate studies, she participated in the Vanderbilt Biomedical Informatics Summer Program in 2017 and was an application developer for the Center for Precision Medicine at VUMC during her first two years at Vanderbilt.