SFI Medical Short Course 2016 - Faculty 2016

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Short Course Faculty:

Ben Althouse, Predicting and Curbing the Next Pandemic, Research Scientist, Institute of Disease Modeling; Former SFI Omidyar Fellow. Ben Althouse has brought his enjoyment of the dynamic, intellectually challenging and inherently collaborative nature of the scientific process to the IDM Epidemiology team as a Research Scientist, where he will explore pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines, the dynamics of enteric diseases, and the role of complex human contact structures on disease transmission. ​He was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and holds a PhD in Epidemiology and a Master of Science in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Biochemistry from the University of Washington. His previous work has included mathematical modeling of sylvatic dengue virus transmission in nonhuman primates in Senegal, examining the role of antimicrobial use on the evolution of drug resistance, using Twitter as a model system of co-infection dynamics, and using novel data sources (such as Google searches, Twitter, and Wikipedia article views) for population-level surveillance of infectious and chronic diseases. Ben is an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Biology at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, and a Guest Lecturer in the Information School at UW.


John Arden Panel
John joined Kaiser Permanente in 1990 after working within the community mental health system for the prior 15 years. During that period, he worked with Native Americans and Latinos in the Southwest, and African-Americans and Asians in San Francisco. While in the Southwest, he wrote a bill for a state legislature in 1980 to provide deinstitutionalized treatment within the mental health system. He is the author of 14 books, mostly in the areas of neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and evidence-based practices.


Hiroshi Ashikaga, Information Theory of the Heart
Dr. Ashikaga received an M.D. and a Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine at the University of Tokyo and Beth Israel Medical Center, where he served as a Chief Resident. He received his research training in Biomedical Engineering and Cardiovascular MRI at the University of California, San Diego and the National Institutes of Health. He also completed clinical training in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.


Elhanan Borenstein The Microbiome
Santa Fe Institute, External Faculty; Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Department of Genome Sciences. My research interests lie in the interplay between evolutionary processes and the organization of biological, ecological and social systems. My goal is to identify fundamental, universal, and generic links between the structure of complex systems and their generative dynamics, and to develop methods to draw novel insights from these links.

David Brailer, Modern Healthcare
David J. Brailer is the CEO of Health Evolution Partners, a health care private equity firm based in San Francisco, California. Previously, Brailer was National Health Information Technology Coordinator. He was appointed on May 6, 2004, pursuant to an executive order by President Bush of April 27, 2004, which called for widespread deployment of health information technology within 10 years.

Brailer remained in his government post for two years. Following his public service, Brailer started a private equity fund in 2007 called Health Evolution Partners with a stated purpose of pursuing "investments in cost-effective, high-quality health care.”


Timothy G. Buchman, Panel
Santa Fe Institute External Faculty, Ph.D., M.D.; Founding Director, Emory Center for Critical Care, and Professor of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, and Emory Center for Critical Care


Christine K. Cassel, Panel
Cassel, MD, President and former CEO of the National Quality Forum, is a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care. Cassel has just joined the leadership team designing the new Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine in Southern California


Joshua Epstein, Modeling Health
Santa Fe Institute External Faculty; Professor of Emergency Medicine; Joint appointments: Departments of Economics, Biostatistics, and Environmental Health at Johns Hopkins University; Director, Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences (CAM) at Johns Hopkins.


Joe Flower, The Future of Healthcare
With over 30 years’ experience, Joe Flower has emerged as a premier observer and thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world. As a healthcare speaker, writer, and consultant, he has explored the future of healthcare nationally and internationally, with clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, and the U.K. National Health Service, to the majority of state hospital associations in the U.S. as well as many of the provincial associations and ministries in Canada, and an extraordinary variety of other players across healthcare – professional associations, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, health plans, physician groups, and numerous hospitals.


Ross Hammond, Obesity and a Complex Systems Approach to Solutions
Santa Fe Institute External Faculty; Senior fellow in Economic Studies and Director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy, Brookings Institution
Ross A. Hammond primary area of expertise is modeling complex dynamics in economic, social, and public health systems using methods from complexity science. His current research topics include obesity etiology and prevention, food systems, tobacco control, behavioral epidemiology, health disparities, childhood literacy, crime, corruption, segregation, and decision-making. Hammond received his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has authored numerous scientific articles in prominent journals such as Lancet, JAMA Pediatrics, American Journal of Public Health, PNAS, Evolution, and Journal of Conflict Resolution, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, New Scientist, Salon, Scientific American, and major news media.


Greg LaGana, MD and Medical Comedian
Greg LaGana completed an internal medicine internship and residency at Harlem Hospital and is board certified in internal medicine. He has worked as a field director for a pediatric nutrition program in Jamaica, a medical educator, an occupational physician for three pharmaceutical corporations, and director of emergency services for both inner-city and suburban community hospitals. He has designed, directed, and owned urgent-care centers. LaGana also co-founded Pegasus Consulting Associates, a strategic management consulting firm, and ARK Technologies, an entrepreneurial think tank exploring the impact of computer and telecommunication technologies on health care. LaGana’s passion for performing began as an amateur magician in grammar school. He has performed in numerous musical comedies in amateur theaters and played the lead roles in Henry IV, Part I, and A Man for All Seasons. He has also played piano and electric keyboards with the BassBoards, a rock and blues band that he co-founded.


Christopher A. Longhurst,Bringing Big Data to the Bedside

Stanford efforts in applied clinical informatics resulted in national attention in 2010 with the publication of the first-ever correlation between implementation of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and a decrease in hospital-wide mortality. This landmark was followed with a 2011 NEJM article describing the first documented use of aggregate EMR data to make a real-time patient care decision. In this talk, Dr. Christopher Longhurst will share the "story behind the story" of these accomplishments, and outline how the EMR and clinical analytics supports the IOM vision for a learning healthcare system. Dr. Longhurst will also share some real-world examples of the value realized by bringing big data to the bedside in both clinical research and commercial startups.

As chief information officer (CIO) for UC San Diego Health, Christopher Longhurst MD, MS, oversees all operations and strategic planning for information and communications technology. He is also responsible for planning and developing all administrative and clinical information systems related to operating UC San Diego Health hospital and clinical facilities.

Dr. Longhurst leads the creation and execution of a comprehensive information strategy to meet future needs of UC San Diego Health along with creating standards, architectures and policies for information technologies across UC San Diego and the UC system. His area of responsibility includes electronic health records and the MyUCSDChart system. UC San Diego Health has reached Stage 7 of electronic medical record (EMR) adoption, a ranking devised by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). This distinction is achieved by less than five percent of U.S. hospitals. UC San Diego Health is consistently recognized nationally as being among the top 100 most wired hospitals by the American Hospital Association’s publication, Hospitals & Health Networks. In addition, UC San Diego Health is recognized as among the top 25 most wireless hospitals, leveraging wireless technology to improve the efficiency of the care process.

Dr. Longhurst is also a key faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He most recently served as chief medical information officer for Stanford Children’s Health, where he led strategic efforts to improve children’s health and provider workflow using information technology. He also founded and led the clinical informatics fellowship at Stanford, where he was a clinical professor of pediatrics. Dr. Longhurst completed his residency at Stanford Medical School and earned his medical degree and MS in medical informatics from UC Davis. He holds a BS in molecular biology from UC San Diego. He is a board-certified pediatrician and clinical informaticist. The author and co-author of many publications on using technology and data to improve patient care and outcomes, Dr. Longhurst was elected a fellow in the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics.


Pilar Ossorio, Machine Learning in Medicine
Dr. Ossorio is Professor of Law and Bioethics where she is on the faculties of the Law School and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the Medical School. In 2011 she became the inaugural Ethics Scholar-in-Residence at the Morgridge Institute for Research, the private, nonprofit research institute that is part of the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery. She also serves as the co-director of UW's Law and Neuroscience Program, as a faculty member in the UW Masters in Biotechnology Studies program, and as Program Faculty in the Graduate Program in Population Health. Prior to taking her position at UW, she was Director of the Genetics Section of the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, and taught as adjunct faculty at the University of Chicago Law School.



Dario Robleto, An Unknown History of the Human Heartbeat
Dario Robleto is a transdisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. Robleto uses unexpected materials such as melted vinyl records, dinosaur bones, meteorites, glass produced by atomic explosions, lost heartbeat recordings from the 19th century, and he transforms these artifacts from the vast inventory of humanity’s collective past into delicately layered objects that are sincere and personal meditations on love, death, eroding memory, and healing.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1997, most recently at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2014) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014). Robleto has been a visiting artist and lecturer at many universities and institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.

In 2013-14 he served as the California College of the Arts Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oakland, CA. He has been a research fellow and resident at institutions such as Rice University (2013-14) and the Smithsonian Museum of American History (2011). In 2015 he joined a distinguished team of scientists as the artistic consultant to “Breakthrough Message”—a multi-national effort that aims to encourage intellectual and technical debate about how and what to communicate if the current search for intelligent beings beyond Earth is successful.

He is currently serving as an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering and at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA. He was recently appointed as the 2016 Texas State Artist Laureate.