Please click on a link below to read each presenter's biography.
Hua Xu, PhD, FACMI
Robert T. McCluskey Professor and Vice Chair for Research and Development, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
Assistant Dean for Biomedical Informatics, Yale School of Medicine
Yale University
Dr. Hua Xu’s primary research interests include biomedical natural language processing (NLP) and data mining, as well as their applications in secondary use of electronic health records data for clinical and translational research. His research is funded by multiple agencies (i.e., NLM, NCI, NIGMS, NIA, AHA, and CPRIT), and methods/tools developed in his lab have been widely used to support diverse biomedical applications.
Jagpreet Chhatwal, PhD
Director, Institute for Technology Assessment, Massachusetts General Hospital
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Core Faculty, Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard University
Faculty Affiliate, Harvard Data Science Initiative
Associate Editor, Value in Health
Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal’s research is centered in decision science, AI, and health economics. He currently leads research in multiple disease areas, including hepatitis C, early cancer detection, opioid and alcohol use disorder, and mental health. Dr. Chhatwal has co-authored over 120 research articles, and his work has been cited in leading media outlets, including NPR, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times.
Miao Zhang, PhD(c)
New York University
Miao Zhang is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate majoring in Computer Science at New York University, advised by Prof. Rumi Chunara. Her research interests span responsible AI (including algorithmic fairness, dataset debiasing, and out-of-domain generalization), computer vision and multimodal learning (particularly label-efficient representation learning), and the application of these techniques to health and social science domains for real-world impact. She has led projects on topics such as quantifying urban greenspace resources and investigating the influence of the built environment on public health. Her work has been published in venues including PNAS, AAAI, CVPR, and AIES.
Simone J. Skeen, PhD, MA
NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow
mHEAL: Mindfulness for Health Equity Lab
Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Brown University
Dr. Simone Skeene’s work integrates applied AI language modeling, HIV social epidemiology, computational social science, and digital therapeutics optimization, with a particular focus on LLM alignment and smartphone-delivered just-in-time adaptive intervention design. She is a license-eligible forensic mental health counselor, experienced in crisis de-escalation, identity formation, trauma-informed care, community-engaged service planning, and harm reduction.
Aron Culotta, PhD
Professor of Computer Science, School of Science & Engineering
Director, Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence
Tulane University
Aron Culotta is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University. His research investigates computational methods to learn about human behavior from online social networks, combining machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis. His interdisciplinary research is supported by several NSF-funded collaborations with researchers in public health, political science, marketing, and emergency management.
Martha Silva, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Tulane University
Her research focus includes health services research and social and behavior change evidence generation for program and policy improvement. From 2018-2023 she was Data Strategist and Innovation Team Lead for the Breakthrough RESEARCH project – a USAID cooperative agreement tasked with advancing social and behavior change by promoting evidence-based solutions to improve health and development programs around the world. In this role, Dr. Silva worked with B-R partners to identify strategic and innovative ways to collect, analyze, and use qualitative and quantitative data to strengthen program interventions in Africa and Latin America. environment on public health. Her work has been published in venues including PNAS, AAAI, CVPR, and AIES.
Lizheng Shi, PhD, MsPharm, MA
Neal A. and Mary Vanselow Chair in Health Management and Policy, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Director, Health Systems Analytics Research Center
Tulane University
Dr. Lizheng Shi is the founding director of Tulane’s Health Systems Analytics Research Center (HSARC). He leads the research team that receives awards from professional organizations. He has published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals and served as principal investigator and co-PI for more than 40 research grants and contracts from AHRQ, CDC, NIH, PCORI, and other public and private funding sources.
Yilu Lin, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Tulane University
Dr. Yilu Lin’s research focuses on predictive modeling using machine learning. She is one of the developers of the socio-Demographic, Metabolic, diabetes-related Complications, and healthcare Utilization for Risk Evaluation (DM-CURE). She is also interested in health service research and health policy. Dr. Lin is a WOC Research Associate affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System.
Tom Carton
Chief Data Officer
Louisiana Public Health Institute
As Chief Data Officer and former Director of Health Services Research for the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI), Dr. Thomas Carton leads multiple teams that conduct various types of health services research that span clinical research, quality improvement, and social epidemiology. As Principal Investigator of the Research Action for Health Network (REACHnet), Dr. Carton leads a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team that is creating a regional informatics, patient engagement, and research infrastructure to efficiently conduct comparative effectiveness research.
Samuel Kakraba, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Data Science, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Tulane University
Dr. Samuel Kakraba’s research centers chiefly on the development and implementation of efficient computationally-driven pipelines aided by robust data science, statistical, mathematical and biostatistical predictive machine learning algorithms like neural networks, deep learning, support vector machines, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, Naïve Bayes, and others, in R statistical software, Python, SAS, and others, for estimation, prediction, and inferences into complex high-dimensional relationships in many fields like pharmaceutical sciences, public health, among others. research.
Patrick Button, PhD, MA
Associate Professor, School of Liberal Arts
Executive Director, Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science
Tulane University
Dr. Button primarily researches discrimination, especially in employment, and especially based on age and disability, although current projects focus on queer people. Button uses variation in time and across states in discrimination laws to see if these laws improve employment and hiring. They also study how discrimination laws affect Social Security Disability Insurance applications for older workers and individuals with disabilities.
Tobin Lassen, MBA, MPH
EVP/Chief Bundled Solutions Officer
Cedar Gate Technologies
Mr. Lassen serves as the Executive Vice President and Chief Bundle Solutions Officer at Cedar Gate, a leading value-based care performance management company. He brings a depth of knowledge and experience in financial healthcare administration. With more than 30 years in value-based care reimbursement, Mr. Lassen oversees the design, strategy, development and management of risk-based bundled payment programs, and the administration and processing of bundled healthcare payments, claims, pricing, services and solutions. As a pioneer in bundled payments and associated administrative technology, he facilitated the expansion of one of the largest cardiovascular bundled payment networks and centers of excellence. Mr. Lassen earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Louisiana State University, his Master of Business Administration from Tulane University, and a Master of Public Health from the University of Texas – School of Public Health in Houston.
Kimberly Gramm, MBA, PhD
Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer
Tulane University
Kimberly Gramm, MBA, PhD, is the inaugural Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer at Tulane University and a leading executive in innovation and economic development. She focuses on strengthening the university’s entrepreneurial pipeline and regional venture capacity to drive growth and sustainability. A published researcher on entrepreneur ecosystems, she has advanced startup creation, commercialization, and university-industry collaborations. With over 16 years of experience, Kimberly has helped launch more than 325 startups and secured $470M in investments. She also manages Tulane Ventures’ $10M biotech, energy, and AI fund. She holds degrees from USF, UT, and Texas Tech, and has earned multiple awards, including the 2024 Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Center Award.
