Faculty

Program Leadership

Yuriy Gusev, Ph.D.

Director, Health Informatics and Data Science
Email: yg63@georgetown.edu
Phone: 202-687-5094

Dr. Yuriy Gusev is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and a Bioinformatics Lead at the Georgetown Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI). He has over 20 years of experience in academic and industry research in the fields of bioinformatics, systems biology, biomarker discovery, and computational modeling of biological systems. Dr. Gusev is leading efforts of a bioinformatics analytical team in the development of pipelines for multi-omics and Next Generation Sequencing data analysis and integration. His team has been involved in many enterprise scale projects including the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC), the In silico Research Center of Excellence, and Georgetown Center for Systems Biology of Cancer as well as external collaborations with NCI, FDA and Argonne National Labs. Dr. Gusev has many years of experience in teaching and training in bioinformatics and computational biology at several academic centers in the US including Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering. He has also developed several new curricula for graduate and undergraduate programs at Georgetown. He has developed a successful Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) titled “Demystifying Big Data” which attracted over 4000 students over 2 semesters from around the world. Dr. Gusev has received his training in applied mathematics and computational biology at St. Petersburg University, Russia and completed his postdoctoral training in cancer genetics at the Waksman Institute of Rutgers University. Read more…

Adil Alaoui, MS, MBA

Director, Industry Capstone Program
Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics
Email: Adil.Alaoui@georgetown.edu
Phone: 202-687-9108

Adil Alaoui, M.S., M.B.A. is the Director of Health Information Technology and Operations at the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics at Georgetown University. He provides leadership, integrated management, and strategic direction to align innovative healthcare requirements with technical solutions. Mr. Alaoui is responsible for the design and implementation of Innovative Health Information Exchange approaches to integrate disparate systems and maintain heterogeneous data in secure research data repositories. He also directs the development of tools and complex technology solutions in support of GUMC’s systems medicine vision and leads the development and implementation of efficient and effective Health Information Technology Solutions. Prior to joining ICBI, Mr. Alaoui led the development and successful implementation of several global Telehealth and Teleradiology projects sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), DoD and Department of State. He also led the design and implementation of a database system for a web based diabetes management system: “MyCareTeam” (an Allscripts EHR integrated module). Mr. Alaoui is an adjunct lecturer at the Nursing and Health Sciences School at Georgetown University. Read more…

Peter McGarvey, PhD

Dr. Peter McGarvey is Director, Innovation Center of Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). He has academic and commercial experience in molecular biology, biotechnology, bioinformatics and software development, and his research interests include genomic and proteomic analysis, biological databases, and data visualization. Read more…

Krithika Bhuvaneshwar, MS

Research Instructor Faculty & Curriculum Coordinator
Email: kb472@georgetown.edu

Ms. Bhuvaneshwar is a Research Instructor Faculty & Curriculum Coordinator for the Master’s in Health Informatics and Data Science program. She is also a Senior Bioinformatician at the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI), Georgetown University. She has over 12 years professional work experience and combines her interdisciplinary skills in bioinformatics and biostatistics for numerous projects within ICBI. She has applied her bioinformatics expertise to develop novel algorithms and analysis pipelines for clinical, genomic and expression profiling data management, quality control and integrative downstream analysis. Apart from her bioinformatics related work, Krithika has been involved in the education and training of national and international students at Georgetown University. She has contributed to the development of massive open online course (MOOC) ‘Demystifying big data in biomedicine – a user’s guide’ for the online education platform – edX; she has also helped with the development of training materials for G-DOC for ‘Translational Bioinformatics’ (SYSM-594) – a graduate level course offered at Georgetown University. Krithika has trained summer interns on using the G-DOC system, and in using the R statistical analysis packages. She has also helped organize training workshops in Elsevier Pathway Studio, Globus Genomics, system, and immuno-oncology, for faculty and staff at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC).

Camelia Bencheqroun, MS

Research Instructor Faculty
Email: cb1544@georgetown.edu

Ms. Bencheqroun is a Research Instructor Faculty for the Master’s in Health Informatics and Data Science program. She is also a the Data Engineer Lead in the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at Georgetown University. Before joining ICBI, Camelia worked as a Business Intelligence Analyst for several companies in France and Canada. She has over 12 years of experience in Data Integration, Data Visualization, and Software development. She is involved in numerous high profile projects to streamline the shared resources data collection, integration and analysis by being responsible for modeling complex problems, discovering the insights and identifying opportunities through the use of algorithmic, mining and visualization techniques.

She also works on Software solutions to facilitate the integration, management, and mining of clinical and experimental data from core facilities such as the Tissue Bank and Patient Registries.

Subha Madhavan, Ph.D., FACMI

Dr. Madhavan is Adjunct Faculty and Founding Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center. She has research interests in data standardization, curation, integration and analytics across multivariate health and life sciences datasets. She is a world-class leader in data science, clinical informatics and health IT who is responsible for several biomedical informatics efforts including the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC) platform, a resource for both researchers and clinicians to realize the goals of personalized medicine. Working across multiple health systems in the Washington DC metropolitan area, she has enabled access to over 4 million patient records for research and education. She partnered with the NIH and the FDA to develop integrative knowledge bases for discovery and regulatory science. She has published novel bioinformatics findings in research articles published in journals such as Nature, Clinical Cancer Research, Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMIA, Bioinformatics, AJPM, Frontiers in Oncology, Bioinformatics, Cancer Informatics, and Molecular Cancer Research (MCR). Read more…

Hank Rappaport, MD

Dr. Hank Rappaport is a Senior Clinical Informaticist in the MedStar Institute for Innovation, a setting in which he creates novel applications of information technology to meet the needs of the healthcare environment. Areas of interest include data analytics, workflow and quality improvement, care coordination, and applications of 3D printing in healthcare. Previously, he held positions in Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group and with the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping to build electronic medical records and hospital information system environments. Dr. Rappaport holds bachelors and masters degrees from MIT, went to medical school at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and did his Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship at UCLA. He is a member of the inaugural class of diplomats certified in Clinical Informatics from the American Board of Preventive Medicine.

Matthew McCoy, Ph.D.

Dr. McCoy is Research Assistant Professor of Oncology, he holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from George Mason University, a M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University, and a B.Sc in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado. As a bioinformatics analyst consulting for the United States national security and intelligence communities, he developed next generation sequencing workflows to assemble bacterial genomes and applied sophisticated mathematical analysis methods to annotate important features. Dr. McCoy developed expertise in a number of bioinformatic and computational biology applications through various industry positions. Past and current projects involve next generation sequence assembly for both genomic and transcriptomic analysis, applying classification and machine learning algorithms to the annotation of relevant sequence elements and association with phenotypic traits, and using molecular simulations to study the impact of mutations on the conformational dynamics and functional kinetics of proteins. Read more…

Samir Gupta, PhD

Dr. Samir Gupta is a Research Faculty, and joined Georgetown-ICBI in April 2019. He is a computer scientist by training and his research interests are in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) and its applications to the biomedical and clinical domain. His current research focuses on developing novel NLP pipelines to extract clinical phenotypes such as cancer outcomes and adverse events from clinical notes. Additionally, he is involved in developing machine learning models to streamline biocuration by extracting associations between bio-entities such as variants, genes, diseases from published literature.

Yili Zhang, PhD

Dr. Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Innovation Center For Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at Georgetown University. She completed her Ph.D. in Information Systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and was mentored by Dr. Güneş Koru in the Health IT Lab. After graduation, she spent a wonderful year at Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS) working with Dr. Firas Wehbe as a postdoctoral scholar.

Her past research projects involved data quality, oncology-related common data model, cancer regimen identification, cancer survival time analysis, home health care quality comparison, etc. She has a solid background in data analysis, and programming, and hopes to apply her research in medical informatics to improve the health care outcomes.

Kristen Miller, DrPH, CPPS

Dr. Miller is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare at MedStar Health. She is a clinically oriented human factors researcher focusing on medical decision-making and behavior, informatics, and the assessment of medical interventions and practices with an emphasis on usability, human error, and patient safety. Her portfolio includes federally funded work from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Her experience spans three public health degrees, a post-doctorate, and experience with the Armstrong Institute and the Department of Veterans Affairs. She has dedicated her career to healthcare human factors, focusing on occupational challenges for healthcare providers and novel approaches to improving patient safety and quality. Dr. Miller is an influential promoter of programs that further the career of female professionals in research and public health and is actively involved in the community through service with the United Way and the Women’s Leadership Council. Read more…

Nathan Cobb, MD

Dr. Nathan Cobb is a practicing Pulmonary and Critical Care physician whose work in informatics and behavior change has spanned non-profit foundations, academia and industry. His research focuses on the development of novel behavior change interventions that leverage social networks, online communications and tailored messaging.

Most recently he served as Chief Medical Officer for the Boston based start-up MeYou Health where he led two successful randomized control trials, developed a novel standards based health risk appraisal system and oversaw the development and deployment of multiple evidence based interventions that were deployed to hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Currently Dr. Cobb serves as an attending physician in the intensive care units at Medstar Georgetown Hospital. He trained in medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and in Pulmonary and Critical Care medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess, Brigham and Women’s and Massachusettes General hospitals. From 2004-2005 he served as a Senior Research Fellow at Boston University School of Public Health and completed a research fellowship in the Tobacco Treatment and Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2008. He received his AB from Georgetown University and MD from Boston University and maintains board certification in Pulmonary and Critical Care medicine.

Lauren Kunz, PhD

Dr. Lauren Kunz is a management consultant leading analytic efforts across commercial health companies and Federal health and science agencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Chemistry and Mathematics with a concentration in Statistics from St. Olaf College. Dr. Kunz was previously a mathematical statistician at the Office of Biostatistics Research within the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute where she focused primarily on clinical trial design, with a particular interest in stepped wedge designs and methods for competing risks. At Georgetown, Dr. Kunzhas been an adjunct professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department for the undergraduate Biostatistical Methods course and in the Medical School teaches Evidence Based Data Analysis in Population Health for the Master’s in Health Informatics & Data Science program.

Anand Basu, MS, MBA

Mr. Basu is President of ESAC Inc, a company that provides research data management, bioinformatics, and healthcare information technology solutions for government, commercial, and academic clients. ESAC’s mission is to play a vital role in helping clinicians, scientists, and researchers across the globe improve all aspects of human health.

He oversees business growth, account management, marketing, and communications at ESAC where he is responsible for the long-term growth of the company including the strategic plan and vision. Prior to this role, Mr. Basu served as Senior Vice President at ESAC as a technology executive focused on business growth and corporate development. He has over 27 years of engineering and management experience in both public and private sector organizations. Before joining ESAC, Mr. Basu served in the public sector with more than 10 years of experience in leading complex technology programs for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Commerce. Prior to joining the federal government, he worked in management, engineering, and consulting positions at Celera Genomics, AT&T Bell Labs, and Cap Gemini America. Mr. Basu holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Wright State College, Dayton Ohio; and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

Simina Boca, PhD

Dr. Simina Boca is an Adjunct Faculty in the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics. Her expertise is centered on the development of methods, tools, and workflows for the analysis of “omics” data and for assessing and integrating evidence in precision medicine. Before joining Georgetown in April 2014, Dr. Boca was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biostatistics Branch within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Biostatistics and an M.H.S. in Bioinformatics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

At Georgetown, Dr. Boca has been a guest lecturer for a number of graduate (Clinical Metabolomics, Bioinformatics Seminar), undergraduate (Biostatistical Methods in the Mathematics department), and medical school (Evidence-Based Medicine and Population Health II) courses. Additionally, she has successfully mentored 3 students in the MS in Biostatistics program and 3 students in the MS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program, Bioinformatics track. Dr. Boca was a teaching assistant in graduate school (2007-2011) and was nominated for the school-wide Teaching Assistant Recognition Award in 2009. Read more…

Bayan Bruss, MS

Bayan is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer within Capital One’s Center For Machine Learning. He leads a team of Machine Learning Engineers developing machine learning based cybersecurity products to strengthen Capital One’s cyber defenses and respond to a dynamic threat landscape. Bayan’s team currently focuses on building a machine learning platform for identifying phishing & other malicious emails entering Capital One. Prior to Capital One, Bayan worked as a Data Science and Big Data engineering consultant with Accenture. There he worked on a range of projects across the Federal and Financial Services industries.

Allan Fong, MS

Allan Fong focuses on developing, integrating, and applying advanced technologies and techniques to study and improve healthcare systems. Allan has a background in engineering, computer science, and human factors, and is particularly interested in natural language processing, predictive analytics, information visualization, and sensor integration to understand clinical workflow and promote patient safety and health literacy. Allan received a master’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in computer science from University of Maryland College Park, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. Read more…