Faculty & Advising
In the Online Master of Science in Clinical Informatics & Patient-Centered Technologies program, you’ll study with distinguished faculty from top-ranked University of Washington schools, including the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine. Our instructors are experts in a range of disciplines and will provide you with a deep and diverse perspective of the field of clinical informatics that will help you advance in your career.
Advising
You’ll be assigned a faculty adviser at the start of the program. Your faculty adviser will provide advice and guidance as you progress through the CIPCT program. They’ll also help you identify project opportunities. The CIPCT program adviser will help you navigate the application process as well as the sequencing of courses and program logistics.
Program Faculty
Andrea Hartzler, Program Co-Director
Andrea Hartzler is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the human-centered design of collaborative health technologies that promote user experience and health equity. She teaches and mentors students from undergraduate to postdoctoral levels and serves UW Medicine as an operational leader in clinical research informatics. She earned her doctorate in biomedical informatics at the UW and is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Sarah Iribarren, Program Co-Director
Sarah Iribarren is an associate professor of biobehavioral nursing and health informatics whose work advances patient-centered digital health solutions. Her research focuses on tuberculosis treatment support, mobile and artificial intelligence–enabled technologies, health equity, and global health, with an emphasis on improving care access and outcomes for underserved populations.
Annie Chen
Annie Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. Her research focuses on engaging patients in behavioral interventions using digital technologies, health-related uses of social media and emerging technologies, and information behaviors in the context of long-term health management. Chen earned a doctorate in information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Trevor Cohen
Trevor Cohen is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. His research focuses on the development and application of methods of distributional semantics methods that represent the meaning of terms and concepts from the ways in which they are distributed in large volumes of electronic texts. He advises several clinical informatics fellows in the CIPCT program. Cohen earned his doctorate in medical informatics at Columbia University.
Jared Erwin
Jared Erwin is a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine and a senior software engineer at Microsoft. After working for 10 years in the medical software space, he returned to school to complete a doctorate in biomedical informatics at the UW, where he focused on genetic relationships to adverse drug events. He also works at Microsoft on medical software interoperability, contributing to Azure Health Data Services. His interests include genomics, pharmacogenomics, research methods and causality. He is currently researching the effectiveness of generative AI to correctly search medical data using interoperable services.
Jan Flowers
Jan Flowers is the director of global health informatics in the Clinical Informatics Research Group at the UW. She focuses on strengthening electronic collection of health information in resource-constrained settings and using quality health data to make evidence-based decisions. Her interests include technology policy and law, health information systems evaluation, open-source communities and health systems as global goods, health technology engineering and implementation, patient-centered technologies and mobile health, and standards-based interoperability for improved care at the point of service, surveillance and program monitoring. Flowers has a master of science from the University of California, San Francisco.
Michael Leu
Michael Leu is a professor of pediatrics and of biomedical informatics and medical education in the UW School of Medicine. He directs the UW Clinical Informatics Fellowship and has served in a variety of leadership roles with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Informatics Association. His research relates to improving medical care, and he is an expert in the construction and implementation of evidence-based clinical recommendations. More recently, he has been supporting his fellows’ efforts in evaluating clinical AI systems, and in using informatics to support educational initiatives. Leu earned a masters of health science at Yale University, and both a masters in computer science and a doctorate in medicine at the UW.
Patricia Reid Ponte
Patricia Reid Ponte is an affiliate associate in the School of Nursing. She is an adjunct clinical associate professor at both the Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing and the master of health administration program at the Woods College of Advanced Studies. She served as chief nursing officer and senior vice president for patient care services at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute for over 17 years and has served in leadership and clinical roles at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and Tuft Medical Center, all in Boston, MA. Her scholarly work focuses on health care quality, patient- and family-centered care, psychological safety and health system leadership.
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch is the chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education and a clinical educator, clinician, biomedical informatics researcher, educator and national lead at the UW for more than 30 years. He’s the director of the Biomedical Informatics Core at the Institute of Translational Health Sciences and chief data officer and interim chief research information officer of UW Medicine Information Technology Services. He serves on many external advisory boards related to data integration, secondary use of electronic health record data, biomedical informatics education, clinical research informatics and translational bioinformatics. He’s also the deputy editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and associate editor for biomedical informatics for the journal Genetics in Medicine. Tarczy-Hornoch's research over the past three decades has focused on integrating clinical, genomic and other data to discover new knowledge and improve clinical care. His current research includes using electronic medical records for translational research, comparative effectiveness research, and integrating genomic and multimodal data for discovery and clinical decision support. Tarczy-Hornoch earned a doctorate of medicine at Stanford University.
Patrick Wedgeworth
Patrick Wedgeworth is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine. He has experience in Epic building, data analytics, patient care in underserved communities and working in an advisory role for municipal public health initiatives. His work is currently focused at the intersection of clinical care, analytics and social determinants of health. Wedgeworth is interested in the use of data analytics and clinical decision support to drive evidence-based, socially informed care that improves patient health and outcomes. He earned a doctorate of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and a master’s degree in information systems management from Carnegie Mellon University. Wedgeworth is also a graduate of the UW Clinical Informatics & Patient-Centered Technologies program.
Meliha Yetisgen
Meliha Yetisgen is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the UW School of Medicine and an adjunct professor in the UW Department of Linguistics. She leads the UW Biomedical Natural Language Processing group. Her group’s research focuses on natural language processing in the clinical domain, enabling meaningful secondary use of health information that directly improves the quality of patient care and advances clinical research. Yetisgen earned a doctorate in information science at the UW.
Weichao Yuwen
Weichao Yuwen is an associate professor in the School of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership at UW Tacoma. Her research focuses on developing, testing and disseminating technology-enabled health solutions for people with chronic conditions and their families in multiple languages. Yuwen co-directs the Responsible Health AI Lab (RHAIL) at UW Tacoma. Yuwen earned her doctorate in nursing at the UW.