Presenter Bios

Dr. Bharel, is a physician executive, internist, and public health innovator focused on using the power of data and analytics to drive innovation and equity in health. She is the Clinical Lead for Global Health, Public Health, and Public Sector Health at Google, based on the Google Health team. In this role, Dr. Bharel fosters collaboration and innovation across Google and the broader Global Health ecosystem through new data insights, AI tools, and research partnerships.

Dr. Bharel previously served as a Senior Advisor to the Mayor of Boston, leading an effort at the intersection of mental health, substance use disorder, and homelessness. Prior to that she served as Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from 2015-2021. As the Commonwealth’s chief physician she oversaw the state’s aggressive response to the opioid overdose crisis and was dedicated to reducing health disparities and developing data-driven, evidence-based solutions for keeping people healthy. Under her leadership the Commonwealth developed the first integrated Public Health Data Warehouse, Dr. Bharel led the Massachusetts public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She is a board-certified internist who has practiced general internal medicine for more than 20 years in various settings. Prior to becoming Commissioner, she was Chief Medical Officer of Boston Health Care for the Homeless. She holds a masters of public health degree from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health in health policy and management. She holds a medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine and completed a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital/Boston Medical Center.

Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, whose mission is to develop the methods, tools, and infrastructure required for a new generation of scientists and care providers to move biomedicine rapidly forward by taking advantage of the insight and precision offered by big data. Kohane develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, from whole health care systems to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment. He also has worked on AI applications in medicine since the 1990’s, including automated ventilator control, pediatric growth monitoring, detection of domestic abuse, diagnosing autism from multimodal data and most recently assisting clinicians using whole genome sequence and clinical histories to diagnose rare or unknown disease patients. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American College of Medical Informatics. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of NEJM AI and co-author of a recent book “The AI Revolution in Medicine.”

Jeff Klann, PhD

Dr. Klann worked with i2b2 for ten years, developing a research agenda that uses i2b2 as a substrate for data analytics, multi-site research networks, software architecture, data standards, and interoperability. His recent appointment as the Director of i2b2 Core Platform Development will allow him to apply his personal experience in large-scale i2b2 projects to improve the core product. In this position, he hopes to engage the vibrant user community, increase the openness and visibility of the software, and to continue to make the core platform relevant to evolving users’ needs. Dr. Klann is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in the Massachusetts General Hospital Laboratory of Computer Science. He holds a BS and MEng in Computer Science from MIT and a PhD from Indiana University in Health Informatics. He completed an NLM Research Training Fellowship concurrently with his PhD.

Dr. Mathew works to advance an unparalleled data ecosystem that enables the school and researchers to better collect, share, and analyze data from across the health system and university in pursuit of breakthroughs in precision medicine and research. She fosters strong partnerships with UW Health, UW–Madison’s Division of Information Technology, and scientists across campus and in the school, to provide innovative informatics and information technology solutions that meet the needs of researchers.

Dr. Murphy is the Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) for the University of Washington (UW) Medicine IT Services. He also serves as Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and Professor of Neurology at the UW School of Medicine, with a core faculty appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME). In addition, he is the Director of the Institute for Medical Data Science (IMDS) and informatics lead for the Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Data Science Core.

Dr. Murphy is a nationally recognized leader in biomedical and clinical research informatics with three decades of experience advancing research data infrastructure, tools, and analytics. Before joining UW, he was Chief Research Information Officer at Mass General Brigham and a Professor of Neurology, where he led innovations in research data platforms and large-scale clinical research support systems. He co-created i2b2, an open-source clinical data integration platform now used by more than 300 institutions worldwide, and developed the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR). His work has influenced standards in clinical data harmonization, privacy-preserving data sharing, and cohort discovery nationally and internationally.

At UW, Dr. Murphy’s focus spans enabling clinical and informatics research via advanced data science, AI, and large-scale computing, fostering collaborations across the research ecosystem, and strengthening the university’s capabilities in translational and clinical discovery.

Directs the Biomedical Research Informatics Core (BRIC) at BIDMC. A result of his research in expertise mining and social network analysis is his invention of an open source social networking website for scientists called Profiles RNS, now used at dozens of universities across the country. It automatically mines large datasets such as PubMed, NIH ExPORTER, and the U.S. patent database to discover investigators’ research areas and scientific networks. It then presents these connections using temporal, geospatial, and network visualizations. The software has numerous applications, ranging from finding individual collaborators and mentors to understanding the dynamics of an entire research community.

Weber is also an investigator on Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), an NIH National Center for Biomedical Computing, for which he helped developed a web-based open source platform that enables a variety of functions, including queries of large clinical repositories for hypothesis testing and identification of patients for clinical trials. He also created the original prototype software for the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE), which is a federated query tool that connects i2b2 databases across multiple institutions. More than 100 institutions worldwide use i2b2 and SHRINE to support clinical research.