Boland Lab

Homepage

My name is Mary Regina Boland. I am an Assistant Professor of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. I am also a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Biomedical Informatics and an Affiliate Member of the Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology at University of Pennsylvania. I am also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical and Health informatics (DBHi) at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I lead the Fertility and Health Informatics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previously, I completed my PhD in biomedical informatics at Columbia University.

I am a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and a Special Program Committee member for their Annual meeting in 2019 in Washington, DC. I hope to see you there!

Research Summary

On the informatics-side, my work focuses on developing novel and interesting data mining methods that integrate data from electronic health records, observational health data and genetic data. On the clinical side, my work focuses on the relationship between environment and disease, especially during the prenatal / perinatal period. Because developmental effects due to the environment can be hard to study in adult populations, I use birth-related data (such as birth month) as a proxy for the environment at birth (perinatal) and prior to birth (prenatal).

Recent News

• Phiwinhlanhla Ndebele-Ngwenya will be presenting the work she conducted this past summer in the Boland Lab at SACNAS 2019. Ms. Ndebele-Ngwenya also won a travel award to present her work in Honolulu Hawaii (Oct 31-Nov 2)!
• Dr. Snigdha Alur-Gupta just won the 1^st prize from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) for her work conducted this past year (Dr. Boland — informatics mentor) 
• Dr. Silvia Canelon will be presenting her work at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) meeting this November. 

Recent Publications

• MR Boland, NP Tatonetti. Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder and Month of School Enrollment. NEJM 2019;380(7):692-693.
• J Moore, MR Boland, P Camara, G Gonzalez, B Himes, D Mowery, M Ritchie, L Shen, R Urbanowicz, J Holmes. Preparing next generation scientists for biomedical big data: Artificial intelligence approaches. Personalized Medicine. 2019
• MR Boland. A Model Investigating Environmental Factors that Play a Role in Female Fecundity or Birth Rate. PLOS ONE. 2018; In press.
• MR Boland, A Kashyap, J Xiong, JH Holmes, S Lorch. Development and Validation of the PEPPER Framework (Prenatal Exposure PubMed ParsER) with Applications to Food Additives. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2018; In press.
• MR Boland,  MS Kraus, E Dziuk, AR Gelzer. Cardiovascular Disease Risk Varies by Birth Month in Canines. Scientific Reports; 2018; 8:7130. 
• MR Boland, F Polubriaginof, NP Tatonetti. Development of A Machine Learning Algorithm to Classify Drugs Of Unknown Fetal Effect. Scientific Reports. 2017; 7: 12839.
• MR Boland, P Parhi, L Li, R Miotto, R Carroll, U Iqbal, P-A Nguyen, M Schuemie, SC You, D Smith, S Mooney, P Ryan, Y-C Li, RW Park, J Denny, JT Dudley, G Hripcsak, P Gentine, NP Tatonetti. Uncovering exposures responsible for birth season – disease effects: a global study..J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2017; In press.
• MR Boland, P Parhi, P Gentine, NP Tatonetti. Climate Classification is an Important Factor in Assessing Quality-of-Care Across Hospitals. Scientific Reports. 2017; 7: 4948. 

Education

PhD Biomedical Informatics, 2017 Columbia University, 2013-2017

Doctoral Thesis: Systems-Level Approach to Understand the Seasonal Factors of Early Development with Clinical and Pharmacological Applications

MPhil Biomedical Informatics, 2016 Columbia University

MA Biomedical Informatics, 2012 Columbia University, 2010-2012

Masters Thesis: Associating Periodontal Diseases with Medical Conditions by Linking Medical and Dental Records

BS Bioinformatics, 2010 Saint Vincent College, 2006-2010

Undergraduate Thesis: Functional Annotation of Putatively Conserved Non-Coding Regions in B. Floridae

Minors: Computer Science, History