Faculty & Advising
In the Online Master of Science in Clinical Informatics & Patient-Centered Technologies program, you’ll study with distinguished faculty from top-ranked University of Washington schools, including the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine. Our instructors are experts in a range of disciplines and will provide you with a deep and diverse perspective of the field of clinical informatics that will help you advance in your career.
Advising
You’ll be assigned a faculty adviser at the start of the program. Your faculty adviser will provide advice and guidance as you progress through the CIPCT program. They’ll also help you identify project opportunities. The CIPCT program adviser will help you navigate the application process as well as the sequencing of courses and program logistics.
Program Faculty
Donna Berry, Program Co-Director
Donna Berry is a professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing & Health Informatics in the UW School of Nursing. Her research interests include leveraging patient-centered technologies to address the human response to cancer. Berry has mentored more than 100 students, trainees and young investigators from disciplines such as nursing, physical therapy, epidemiology, sociology and medicine. Berry is an Advanced Oncology Certified Nurse and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She earned her doctorate in nursing science at the UW.
Andrea Hartzler, Program Co-Director
Andrea Hartzler is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. Her research interests include consumer health informatics, social computing, human-centered design and collaborative health technology. Her research focuses on the design of collaborative technologies that empower people through interaction with social networks and health professionals, using human-centered design, social computing and patient-generated data to facilitate peer support and enhance patient-provider relationships. She earned her doctorate in biomedical informatics at the UW.
Annie Chen
Annie Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. Her research focuses on engaging patients in behavioral interventions using digital technologies, health-related conversations in social media and other digital spaces, and patient information behaviors in the context of long-term health management. Chen earned a doctorate in information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Trevor Cohen
Trevor Cohen is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. His research focuses on the development and application of methods of distributional semantics methods that represent the meaning of terms and concepts from the ways in which they are distributed in large volumes of electronic texts. He advises several clinical informatics fellows in the CIPCT program. Cohen earned his doctorate in medical informatics at Columbia University.
Jared Erwin
Jared Erwin is a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine and a senior software engineer at Microsoft. After working for 10 years in the medical software space, he returned to school to complete a doctorate in biomedical informatics at the UW, where he focused on genetic relationships to adverse drug events. He also works at Microsoft on medical software interoperability, contributing to Azure Health Data Services. His interests include genomics, pharmacogenomics, research methods and causality. His research focuses on genetic association to adverse drug events.
Jan Flowers
Jan Flowers is the director of global health informatics in the Clinical Informatics Research Group at the UW. She focuses on strengthening electronic collection of health information in resource-constrained settings and using quality health data to make evidence-based decisions. Her interests include technology policy and law, health information systems evaluation, open-source communities and health systems as global goods, health technology engineering and implementation, patient-centered technologies and mobile health, and standards-based interoperability for improved care at the point of service, surveillance and program monitoring. Flowers has a master of science from the University of California, San Francisco.
Sarah Iribarren
Sarah Iribarren is an assistant professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing & Health Informatics in the UW School of Nursing. Her research focuses on developing cutting-edge interventions for emerging economies that facilitate self-management of health and prevent disease. Her interests include global health, infectious disease, tuberculosis, treatment self-management, and mobile and connected health. Iribarren is a registered nurse and earned a doctorate in nursing and global health at the University of Utah.
Michael Leu
Michael Leu is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education (BIME) and is the director of the UW Medicine/BIME Clinical Informatics Fellowship. A pediatric teaching hospitalist, he works at Seattle Children’s Hospital as a physician informatician in their award-winning Clinical Effectiveness group. He serves in a variety of leadership groups at the American Academy of Pediatrics related to applied clinical informatics, particularly in the context of quality improvement, patient safety and guidelines. He is interested in ensuring that the best care can be identified and practiced by clinicians throughout Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. Leu earned a master of health science at Yale University and a doctorate of medicine at the UW.
Bill Lober
Bill Lober holds a joint appointment in the UW Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health. He also serves as co-director for the Clinical Informatics Research Group and is interested in clinical informatics as well as public health and population-based informatics. He studied electrical engineering at Tufts University and holds a doctorate of medicine from the University of California, San Francisco.
Patricia Reid Ponte
Patricia Reid Ponte is an affiliate associate professor and teaches in the Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies curriculum at the University of Washington. She is also a clinical associate professor at both the Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing and The Woods College of Advanced Studies, Master of Health Administration Program. She has an appointment as a professor of practice at Simmons University, College of Natural, Behavioral and Health Sciences, where she teaches in the DNP Nurse Executive Leadership Program. She is a member of the board of trustee at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts, and a member of the Beth Israel Lahey Health System Quality Committee. She was a 2001 Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Executive Fellow and is an active member of the American Academy of Nursing. Her scholarly work focuses on health care quality, patient- and family-centered care, and health system leadership. She received her doctor of nursing science degree from Boston University.
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch is the chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education and head of the Division of Biomedical & Health Informatics in the UW School of Medicine. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research. His current research in collaboration with computer scientists focuses on the integration of biomedical and health data, including looking at ways of handling semi-structured data, representing uncertainty at various levels in the system and doing computerized reasoning over integrated data. Tarczy-Hornoch earned a doctorate of medicine at Stanford University.
Patrick Wedgeworth
Patrick Wedgeworth is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. He has experience in Epic building, data analytics, patient care in underserved communities and working in an advisory role for municipal public health initiatives. His work is currently focused at the intersection of clinical care, analytics and social determinants of health. Wedgeworth is interested in the use of data analytics and clinical decision support to drive evidence-based, socially informed care that improves patient health and outcomes. He earned a doctorate of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and a master’s degree in information systems management from Carnegie Mellon University. Wedgeworth is also a graduate of the UW Clinical Informatics & Patient-Centered Technologies program.
Meliha Yetisgen
Meliha Yetisgen is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. She leads the UW Biomedical Language Processing Group. Her research interests include biomedical and clinical text processing, statistical natural language processing and information retrieval. Yetisgen earned a doctorate in information science at the UW.
Weichao Yuwen
Weichao Yuwen is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership at UW Tacoma. Her research focuses on developing, testing and disseminating technology-enabled health solutions for people with chronic conditions and their family caregivers. She leads a transdisciplinary team in developing an artificial intelligence-augmented health platform for family caregivers called Caring of Caregivers Online (COCO). Yuwen earned her doctorate in nursing at the UW.