Post-doctoral Programs

Background:
Dr. Paul Lukac is a current Clinical Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health. Dr. Lukac previously completed a residency in Pediatrics at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and then practiced for three years as an Attending Hospitalist at Lurie Children’s Hospital. He recently graduated from the UCLA Anderson School of Management with a Master of Business Administration. At UCLA Anderson, he focused on data analytics in both healthcare and business, worked for a machine-learning based health tech start-up and completed a hospital administration internship at the Office of Health Informatics and Analytics at UCLA Health. As a fellow, Dr. Lukac will focus on clinical decision support and cost reduction. His current and future research interests include predictive analytics, machine-learning and regression discontinuity in healthcare.

Background:
Timothy Lee is a current Clinical Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health. Prior to medical school he completed an MS in community health focusing on health policy and administration particularly in the realm of community development. During Residency in Family Medicine at UCI, he served as Chief Resident of Quality Improvement and President of the House Safety Officers for GME. Focusing on quality, safety and improvement led to involvement in his department go live for EPIC and an interest in the role of technology in improving healthcare delivery. His current and future research interests focus on how to assess, implement and analyze health technologies and the impact they have on healthcare delivery especially in the realms of population health. This includes an interest in the role predictive analytics has on caring for populations and its role in investigating social determinants of health.

Background:
Dr. Douglas Murad is a current Clinical Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health. As an Internal Medicine resident at Mayo Clinic Arizona, his research focused on prediction of mortality in ventilated ICU patients using neural network models. As a fellow at UCLA, Dr. Murad will be developing clinical decision support tools to improve patient outcomes. His current and future research areas also include predictive analytics, telehealth, and automation of clinical practice.

Background:
Dr. Indira Gowda is a current Clinical Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health. While completing residency in Emergency Medicine at Mount Sinai, Indira became involved in the Asthma Mobile Health Study that was a part of Apple’s larger ResearchKit. This study leveraged mobile apps in order to complete a national observational study involving thousands of participants. In addition she worked with BrainCheck, deploying their concussion app in the Emergency Department in order to determine if app exposure improved patient satisfaction and overall knowledge of disease. As a fellow at UCLA, Dr. Gowda would like to continue work with app development that engages patients in their healthcare. In addition she would like to explore implementing predictive analytics in the ED setting in order to improve workflow.

*Also a recipient of the CTSI Biomedical Informatics Fellowship.

Background:
Cameron Escovedo is a current Clinical Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health. During medical school at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, his research focused on medical education and included starting an anatomy tutoring program and a board review lecture series in Pediatrics. He just completed a Chief Resident year in Pediatrics at the UCLA Department of Pediatrics. During this time, he also completed the Resident Informaticist program at UCLA, and re-designed UCLA CareConnect’s SmartLinks that automate the population of clinical information into documentation templates. His current and future research will focus on incorporating the measurement of Social Determinants of Health into the electronic medical record, and providing clinicians with decision support on social interventions.

*Also a recipient of the CTSI Biomedical Informatics Fellowship.

Background:
Elijah Bell is the 2016 Clinical Informatics Fellow for UCLA Health. While attending Harvard Medical School, Dr. Bell led a research study at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital which evaluated the compliance of a custom, home-grown electronic Emergency Department patient discharge instructions module with Outpatient Measure 19, a national quality metric for Emergency Department discharge instructions mandated by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Additionally, during his Emergency Medicine Residency at the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Bell started developing an open-source, low-cost, highly customizable, and interoperable health information platform which utilizes the ARM CPU architecture in a manner similar to Raspberry Pi. Ultimately, Dr. Bell aspires to become a highly-engaged faculty member and leader in Clinical Informatics at an academic institution committed to advancing the medical field at large through ingenuity and innovation. For this fellowship, Dr. Bell's research focuses on the impact of clinical decision support and mobile triage apps on emergency department length of stay in patients presenting with chest pain.

*Also a recipient of the CTSI Biomedical Informatics Fellowship.

Background:
Dr. Jesus Torres is a current National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) fellow at UCLA. During residency at UCSF in Emergency Medicine, he conducted research and published on the effects of policy on health disparities of immigrant patients presenting to the emergency department. He obtained an MPH from Harvard University in quantitative methods and has a broad experience in infectious disease clinical trials. His research interests includes immigrant health and policy and clinical studies in emergency medicine.

Background:
Dr. Iheanacho Obinnaya Emeruwa ("Obi") is a Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) Fellow in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at UCLA. He holds a bachelor's degree in biomedical sciences and engineering from Harvard University, and completed the joint MD-MBA program at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Columbia Business School, where he was recognized as a Botwinick Scholar and a Forbes Future Healthcare Leader. Dr. Emeruwa completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital / Columbia University Medical Center and is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is an inaugural Biodesign Innovation Fellow at UCLA Health and a PhD candidate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. Dr. Emeruwa is interested in identifying large-scale opportunities for implementing quality-changing technologies and workflows in healthcare.

Background:
Dr. Jacob Quinton is a primary care internist with an interest in increasing value, access and equity in US health care. He completed his medical training at LSU New Orleans School of Medicine, where as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow he led programs to improve reproductive health education in New Orleans public schools, and with an interest in health disparities founded and led the first ‘Student Hotspotting’ program in New Orleans. He trained at Yale New Haven Hospital in their Internal Medicine / Primary Care program with his outpatient clinic at the West Haven VA Center of Excellence (COE). His research during residency compared risk indexes for hospitalization and mortality at use in the VA which won the Hopkins GIM Housestaff Research Award in Population Health. Dr. Quinton’s current research interests include high-needs high-cost care, social determinants of health, payment model redesign and health reforms to achieve universal access.

Background:
Dr. David Richards completed his residency in Pediatrics at Ronald Reagan Medical Center, UCLA. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, a Masters of Art in Teaching from American University, and his medical degree from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. During his time in medical school, he was the winner of the Department of Pediatrics award for student research. He was also named the 2014 Jefferson Public Citizen Awardee, during which he was funded to mentor a group of undergraduate and nursing students to design, implement, and evaluate a community health worker training program in Limpopo, South Africa. Dr. Richards’ research interests include school-based health centers, climate change and health, and adverse childhood experiences related to housing, lived environment, and neighborhood characteristics.

Background:
Dr. Kia Skrine Jeffers is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program in the David Geffen School of Medicine Department of General Internal Medicine/Health Services Research and UCLA School of Nursing. Dr. Skrine Jeffers earned her undergraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism from North Carolina A&T State University, and her Master’s and doctoral degrees in Nursing from UCLA. She is a practicing community-based nurse. Her research focuses on the impact of intersecting psycho-, bio-, behavioral and life course experiences on type 2 diabetes risks among African American seniors; diabetes prevention and self-management interventions; and, healthcare policies that impact equity and access for underresourced populations.

Background:
Dr. Angela Venegas-Murillo completed her residency in Social Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. She earned her undergraduate degree with a major in psychobiology and minor in Spanish from UCLA. She obtained her medical degree from Stanford University and MPH in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley. During medical school, Dr. Venegas-Murillo went to Oaxaca, Mexico where she helped performed a needs assessment, and conducted a resource and hazard mapping study to understand local health issues. She later collaborated with a local community organization in Central California to better understand the plight of accessing interpretation services by indigenous Mexican migrants. During residency, she turned her focus on access to confidential care by urban adolescents and local advocacy for fair chance hiring. As a fellow, she would like to focus on developing effective methods of reducing violence and recidivism among youth in impoverished communities. In particular, she would like to study the effectiveness of juvenile justice re-entry programs and assess the needs of the community for improved access to mental health services before and after a conviction.

Background:
Dr. Buhr graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Arts in molecular biology from Azusa Pacific University in 2006 and completed his Doctor of Medicine degree at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of California in 2010. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Georgetown University Hospital in 2013, serving as chief resident at the DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center the following year before starting a fellowship in pulmonary & critical care medicine in 2014 at UCLA, which he will complete in 2017. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary Disease. Dr. Buhr began his PhD in health policy and management in 2015. He research focuses on the social, demographic, and administrative factors that affect hospitalization and readmission in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), both in the UCLA health system and using national claims data.

Background:
Dr. Shaw Natsui is an emergency medicine physician with an interest in urban health, public policy, and the use of data science to improve clinical care and population health. He trained at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. During residency, his research focused on acute stroke care for non-English-preferring patients, predictive analytics and machine learning approaches to improving diagnosis, and the ED patient experience. He also helped organize collaborative efforts to improve the ED care for vulnerable patients, particularly those facing housing insecurity. Dr. Natsui is interested in improving the quality of acute care delivery and access to care for limited-resource populations. He plans to focus on the implementation science of leveraging health services research to inform and lead multidisciplinary interventions and policies on the local, state, and national levels.