Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award

2025

First Prize

• Yi Lin, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  Toward Efficient Yet Effective Algorithms for Medical Image Segmentation

Honorable Mention

• Yuzhe Yang, MIT
  Machine Learning Approaches that Extend Healthcare: Algorithms & Applications

Finalist

• Yue Guo, University of Washington, Seattle
  Making Health Knowledge Accessible Through Personalized Language Processing
• Adriene Pichon, Columbia University
  Supporting the Work of Patients and Providers in Complex Chronic Illness
• ChangChang Yin, The Ohio State University 
  Actionable Deep Learning Methods on Multi-Modal Electronic Health Records

First Prize

• Alice Tang, PhD, University of California, San Francisco
  Dissertation: Leveraging Clinical Data and Knowledge Networks to Derive Insights Into Alzheimer’s Disease

Honorable Mention

• Linying Zhang, PhD, Columbia University
  Dissertation: Causal machine earning for reliable real-world evidence generation in healthcare

Finalist

• Monica Agrawal, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Dissertation: Towards Scalable Structured Data from Clinical Text

• Sirui Ding, PhD, Texas A&M University
  Dissertation: Human-Center AI for Precision Medicine: Methods and Applications

First Prize

• Mayla Rachel Boguslav, PhD, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
  Dissertation: Revealing and Exploring the Literature’s Known Unknowns: Ignorance and How it Drives Science

Honorable Mention

• Anna Ostropolets, MD, PhD, Odysseus Data Services
  (Dissertation received at Columbia University)
  Dissertation: Generating Reliable and Responsive Observational Evidence: Reducing Pre-analysis Bias

Finalist

• Surabhi Datta, PhD, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Dissertation: Spatial Information Extraction from Radiology Reports

First Prize

• Zongwei Zhou, PhD, Arizona State University
  Dissertation: Towards Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning for Computer-Aided Diagnosis
  Defense | Slides

Honorable Mention

• Elliot Mitchell, PhD, Columbia University
  Dissertation: Enabling Automated, Conversational Health Coaching with Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

Finalists

• Tiffany Callahan, PhD, MPH, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
  Dissertation: Learning Deep Translational Patient Representations: Systematic Integration of Clinical Records and Biomedical Knowledge
• Aaron Coyner, PhD, Oregon Health & Sciences University
  Dissertation: Machine Learning for Disease Detection and Prediction in Retinopathy of Prematurity
• Yanrong (Jerry) Ji, PhD, Northwestern University
  Dissertation: Development of Informatics Methods for Analysis of Complex Gene Regulation and Transcriptome Diversity Data in Cancer
• Matthew Lenert, PhD, Vanderbilt University
  Dissertation: The Deep Aion Project: Exploring How Different Temporal Representations Can Benefit Deep Longitudinal Models

First Prize

• Denis Newman-Griffis, PhD, The Ohio State University
  Dissertation: Capturing Domain Semantics with Representation Learning: Applications to Health and Function

Honorable Mention

• Amelia Averitt, MPH, MA, PhD, Columbia University
  Dissertation: Machine Learning Methods for Causal Inference with Observational Biomedical Data

Finalists

• Muhammad Amith, MS, PhD, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Dissertation: Design and Architecture of an Ontology-driven Dialogue System for HPV Vaccine Counseling
• Kevin Lybarger, PhD, University of Washington
  Dissertation: Extracting Information from Clinical Text with Limited Annotated Data
• Sarah Mullin, PhD, MS, University at Buffalo
  Dissertation: Sending AI Algorithms to Medical School: Transfer Learning in Medicine Towards Enhanced Model Performance and Bias Reduction
• Hiral Soni, PhD, Arizona State University
  Dissertation: Informatics Approaches to Understand Data Sensitivity Perspectives of Patients with Behavioral Health Conditions

First Prize

• Maulik Kamdar, Stanford University
  Dissertation: ‘ A Web-Based Integration Framework Over Heterogeneous Biomedical Data and Knowledge Sources ’

Honorable Mention

• Sharon Davis, Vanderbilt University
  Dissertation: ‘ Stabilizing Calibration of Clinical Prediction Models in Non-Stationary Environments: Methods Supporting Data-Driven Model Updating’

Finalists

• Yingxiang Huang, University of California San Diego
  Dissertation: Preservation of Patient Level Privacy: Federated Classification and Calibration Models
• Pengtao Xie, Carnegie Mellon University
  Dissertation: Diversity-promoting and Large-scale Machine Learning for Healthcare
• Zexian Zeng, Northwestern University
  Dissertation: Mutational Processes Modeling and Early Cancer Diagnosis

First Prize

• Travis Goodwin, University of Texas at Dallas
  Dissertation: ‘ Medical Question Answering and Patient Cohort Retrieval’

Honorable Mention

• Jessica (Jette) Lowell Henderson, University of Texas at Austin
  Dissertation: ‘ Learning and Validating Clinically Meaningful Phenotypes from Electronic Health Data’

Finalists

• Zhaobin Kuang, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  Dissertation: Towards Learning with High Causal Fidelity from Longitudinal Event Data
• Lina Sulieman, Vanderbilt University
  Dissertation: Learning Clinical Data Representations for Machine Learning
• Ye Ye, University of Pittsburgh
  Dissertation: Transfer Learning for Bayesian Case Detection Systems

First Prize

• Bethany Percha, Stanford University
  Dissertation: ' Biomedical Text Mining From Context'

Honorable Mention

• Yonatan Halpern, New York University
  Dissertation: ' Semi-Supervised Learning for Electronic Phenotyping in Support of Precision Medicine'

Finalists

• Brett Beaulieu-Jones, University of Pennsylvania
  Dissertation: Machine Learning Methods to Identify Hidden Phenotypes in the Electronic Health Record
• Marzyeh Ghassemi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Dissertation: Representation Learning in Multi-Dimensional Clinical Timeseries for Risk and Event Prediction
• Wei Wei, University of California San Diego
  Dissertation: Information Retrieval in Biomedical Research: From Articles to Datasets
• Weiyi Xia, Vanderbilt University
  Dissertation: Optimizing the Privacy Risk - Utility Framework in Data Publication

First Prize

• Rimma Perotte (Pivovarov), Columbia University
  Dissertation: 'Electronic Health Record Summarization over Heterogeneous and Irregularly Sampled Clinical Data'

Honorable Mention

• Yuan Luo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Dissertation: 'Towards Unified Biomedical Modeling with Subgraph Mining and Factorization Algorithms'

Finalists

• Genna R. Cohen, University of Michigan
  Dissertation: Physician Practice Variation in Electronic Health Record Documentation
• Steven G. Johnson, University of Minnesota
  Dissertation: A Data Quality Framework for the Secondary Use of Electronic Health Information
• Azadeh Nikfarjam, Arizona State University
  Dissertation: Health Information Extraction from Social Media
• Kun-Hsing Yu, Stanford University
  Dissertation: Integrating Omics and Histopathology Profiles for Precision Medicine