Oliver Bear Don't Walk, IV, PhD

Oliver J. Bear Don't Walk IV is a citizen of the Apsaalooke Nation in present day Montana and grew up in Washington. They are a Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington and received their PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University. Oliver's research is at the intersection of clinical natural language processing, fairness, and ethics. Their thesis focuses on the technical and ethical aspects of extracting race and ethnicity from clinical notes and how social and behavioral determinants of health can be used to inform an intersectional understanding of fairness for prognostic HIV machine learning models. Oliver was a subcommittee chair AMIAís Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force, and one of the founders of the Justice Informatics group Columbia University's Department of Biomedical Informatics. Oliver is thankful for the community support which has brough him this far, and as such Oliver pays it forward through teaching and mentorship positions such as serving as an organizer for the inaugural IndigiData workshop and instructor for the DBMI Summer Research Program at Columbia University.