WASHINGTON, DC – The American Medical Informaticians Association (AMIA) is proud to announce the winners of the 2024 Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award. Alice Tang, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, received the First Prize award with her dissertation titled Leveraging Clinical Data and Knowledge Networks to Derive Insights Into Alzheimer's Disease. Linying Zhang, PhD, of Columbia University received Honorable Mention for her dissertation titled "Causal machine earning for reliable real-world evidence generation in healthcare."
The awardees will be acknowledged at the AMIA 2024 Annual Symposium, November 9-13 in San Francisco. Drs. Tang and Zhang will present their work to their informatics colleagues onsite during a scientific session at the Symposium.
The AMIA Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award offers high-value and prestigious recognition for the top doctoral dissertation each year that contributes to the science of informatics in any biomedical application domain or domains. Read the suggested guidelines published by JAMIA in 2016 for the preparation of high-quality dissertations in biomedical informatics.
"Dr. Tang's work has the potential to significantly impact the care of dementia by robustly identifying early patients at the highest risk of dementia via medical record," says Jonathan Golob, MD, PhD.
"While focused on Alzheimer's Disease, Dr. Tang's work demonstrates the potential of repurposing clinical data for precision medicine across a broad range of diseases," says Nima Aghaeepour, PhD.
"Dr. Zhang's dissertation integrates methodologies from computer science, statistics, and informatics to strengthen the theoretical foundation as well as providing pragmatic solutions to pressing issues in large-scale evidence generation from messy real-world data," says Philip R.O. Payne, PhD. "It represents a significant leap forward in informatics methodology and promises extensive applicability across biomedical and health domains."
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About AMIA
AMIA is the professional home for more than 5,500 informatics professionals, representing frontline clinicians, researchers, public health experts, and educators who bring meaning to data, manage information, and generate new knowledge across the research and healthcare enterprise. As the voice of the nation's biomedical and health informatics professionals, AMIA plays a leading role in advancing health and wellness by moving basic research findings from bench to bedside, and evaluating interventions, innovations and public policy across care settings and patient populations.