Description of Clinical Expertise

Women's health; Prenatal exposures; Ovarian cancer; Ovarian disorders

Description of Other Expertise

Diversity and Inclusion:
I come from a low socioeconomic status household, which is a NIH recognized 'disadvantaged' background. This has fueled my passion for research into socioeconomic disparities among other types of disparities that exist in healthcare. I am committed to promoting Penn's efforts to promote student inclusion and diversity and I am actively involved in promoting diversity at the University of Pennsylvania through various institutional programs.

Courses:
BMIN 505: Precision Medicine and Health Policy
Offered during the spring semester, Wednesdays, 3:30-6:30pm (1 CU)
Course director: Mary Regina Boland, PhD

This course is designed to provide an in-depth exploration in various health policy implications of informatics research and ways to incorporate precision medicine science into the healthcare system using informatics. The implications this will have in the next decade of clinical science will be discussed along with health policy implications, and the role of clinical decision making in this space.

Description of Research Expertise

The goal of our lab is to develop novel methods that shed light on environmental and socioeconomic exposures that are important in women's health and fetal outcomes.

Our research focuses on developing novel and shareable informatics methods that utilize clinical and genetics data obtained during routine clinical care to enable novel discoveries.

We explore several key areas:
- Environment: We explore the relationship between birth season and later risk of disease, using birth season as a proxy for seasonal variance in environmental exposures. We are also delving deeper into environmental pollutants, toxins and exposures that are pertinent to the Philadelphia area.
- Medications: We investigate the role of pharmaceutical drugs taken during the prenatal period and their relationship with outcomes for women and their offspring.
- Genetics: We leverage the power of the Penn Medicine Biobank to enable novel discoveries pertinent for women's health

Each of these areas requires the development of novel and shareable methods tailored to specific exposures and outcomes.

Keywords: Electronic Health Records; Genetics; BioBank; Reproducibility; Data Sharing; Informatics; Algorithms; Text Mining; Knowledge Reuse and Discovery; Machine Learning; Deep Learning; Data-Driven Knowledge Discovery