PhD Career Connections: Big Data
PhD Career Connections presents:
Big Data
Tuesday, March 10
9:00-10:00am
Light Hall 214
featuring Tom Lasko, PhD, and Elizabeth Ann Stringer, PhD
Thomas A. Lasko, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Tom has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and an MD from UC San Diego. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Computer Science at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital, and a clinical internship at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center in La Crosse, WI (where he learned about all of the ways in which those bucolic farms will try to kill you if you set foot on them). He spent a few years as a Software Engineer at Google, where he developed the completely data-driven algorithm that powers the diagnosis engine called Google Symptom Search, and investigated methods to spot interesting medical patterns in the mind-bogglingly-massive Google query stream. His current research interest is in the computational aspects of precision, personalized medicine, including the data-driven discovery of unknown or emerging medical phenotypes from EMR data.
Elizabeth Ann Stringer, National Director of Science, Axial Healthcare
Elizabeth Ann Stringer, a Nashville native, graduated from Sewanee in 2003 with a B.S. in Physics and from Vanderbilt in 2010 with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Her doctoral research focused on mapping somatosensory and pain processing in the healthy human brain with ultra high field fMRI at 7T. During her postdoctoral training at Stanford, she worked on several projects including measuring the neural effects of opioid exposure using MRI in the treatment of various pain syndromes and identifying biomarkers for chronic inflammatory conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and Gulf War illness.
In 2013, Elizabeth Ann moved back to Nashville and started working for an early-stage startup, Axial Healthcare. Axial is a pain care solutions company, informed by advanced analytics and clinical evidence, and enabled by technology. Elizabeth Ann mines healthcare claims data to identify pain patients at risk for poor medical outcomes and to evaluate the performance of practitioners practicing in the pain space.