DCI Core Director

James H. Willig, MD, MSPH is Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine at UAB, and serves as Medical Informatics Director for the 1917 HIV Clinic and the UAB Health System Information Systems (HSIS).  He was recently appointed Assistant Dean for Clinical Education in the UAB Heersink School of Medicine.  Dr. Willig has led efforts to build and implement patient reported outcomes capture software and mobile device software solutions as the physician lead designer for multiple projects funded by the CDC, NIH, Alabama Department of Public Health, pharma companies, PCORI, and nonprofit foundations for multiple modalities over the past 5-6 years.  In the past few years, he has received two awards to create mobile software systems for education and research purposes (Kaizen-ME and WoundSelfie, the initial incarnation of the current SkinSelfie software template) which have been successfully implemented.  Dr. Willig consults with P30 users in the development of mobile health software designed to uniquely capture data and interact with the patients each is serving.  He leads the team of DCI informatics experts in providing consultation services to CCCR investigators in the functionality and desirability of software, lead discussions regarding building the platform, testing and implementing it in practical applications, and maintaining the app long-term for positive research and clinical outcomes. 

DCI Core Associate Director

Maria Danila, MD, MSPH is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology. She is a practicing rheumatologist and outcomes researcher with expertise in observational studies and biorepositories, genomics, and implementation of evidence and new technologies in clinical practice. She currently leads a multi-site project to design a multimodal intervention to improve adherence to evidence-based treatment recommendations in rheumatoid arthritis.  Her expertise is in implementation science, quality and patient safety, and patient engagement. She serves on the ACR’s Committee on Quality of Care. Dr. Danila previously served as the Ambulatory Director of the Rheumatology Clinics at UAB and has experience working with patients, family members, providers, nursing staff and healthcare administrators to optimize the quality and patient-centeredness of clinical services.

Co-Investigator

John Osborne, PhD is Assistant Professor of Medicine with the UAB Informatics Institute. The current focus of his research is to build the tools, methods and infrastructure needed to explore the relationship between genotype and phenotype - with a focus on clinical natural language processing to extract human phenotype information from biomedical text. He is actively exploring the application of recurrent neural networks in this problem space. He is the lead developer for PheDRS, a flexible natural language processing (NLP) pipeline used for case/phenotype identification for multiple types of disease in service of various research initiatives in various stages of planning and funding. Dr. Osborne also brings substantial bioinformatics expertise to the team. Given his unique set of skills, Dr. Osborne’s role is to ensure that the software needed for data analysis is made available to investigators when their findings are moved to our secure storage and analytics servers. In addition, he helps P30 users extract findings from our enterprise data warehouse using NLP (e.g., analysis of pathology, radiology or clinical free text notes, facilitated by web-based annotation tools already housed on PEER servers) and his PheDRS software, enhancing case finding beyond what can be accomplished through querying diagnostic codes and other discrete data in our EMR.

Co-Investigator

Amy Wang, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medicine and Family and Community Medicine at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. A board-certified family physician, she is one of the first physicians to become board certified in the new subspecialty of clinical informatics. Her areas of expertise include biomedical ontologies, health standards, electronic medical records (EMRs), and informatics education. She has many years of experience in applied informatics in the private sector, focusing on the improvement of the capture, exchange, and use of patient information through health terminologies and standards. As Director of Knowledge and Chief Medical Officer at Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO), she developed and implemented health terminologies for EMRs, helping health organizations standardize their documentation and transition to ICD-10-CM. While at the College of American Pathologists (CAP), she served on the international team that designed and developed SNOMED CT, a comprehensive health terminology and international standard, served as a U.S. representative on the Content Committee of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO, now SNOMED International), and advised the international community on the content development of SNOMED CT, which is now used in over 30 countries. Dr. Wang is available to advise P30 users with regard to understanding how to apply ontologies and informatics solutions to biomedical research and facilitate their research through her role with the UAB Informatics Institute.

Informatics Manager and Systems Specialist

Alfredo Guzman, MEng, is an Informatics Manager in the Division of Infectious Diseases functioning as the Information Technology Director for the Research and Informatics Service Center (RISC) and the 1917 HIV/AIDS Clinic. He has been intimately involved in the design and development of software applications in conjunction with his team of programmers and data analysts and Dr. Willig for over 11 years at UAB, including patient-reported outcomes (PRO) platforms, mobile software apps, and other web-based data collection programs.  Mr. Guzman coordinates DCI consulting, software design, database management, data security, and network maintenance for the DCI Resource Core in collaboration with CCCR investigators, ensuring the software developers and physician-researchers communicate goals and capabilities effectively, overseeing all aspects of each project.  

System Analyst/Programmer

Srini Ponna, MCE, Programmer/Analyst in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine at UAB and holds an MCE degree.  He is available to consult with physician investigators on designing software apps to meet the needs of their individual research and clinical needs.  Additionally, Mr. Ponna performs testing and implementation for all app software and put into effect updates needed to accomplish the goals of P30 users.

Data Analyst

Business Manager

Briana Bass has several years of research administration, leadership, and grants management experience at UAB.  She currently serves as Business Director in the Division of Infectious Diseases.