Three students within the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were awarded top honors at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2024 Annual Symposium, held this year in November in San Francisco.
Victor Borza, MD, PhD student, and Uday Suresh, PhD student, were selected as finalists for the AMIA 2024 Student Paper Competition for their papers titled “Adaptive Recruitment Resource Allocation to Improve Cohort Representativeness in Participatory Biomedical Datasets” and “Behavior Shifts in Patient Portal Usage During and After Policy Changes Around Test Result Delivery and Notification”, respectively.
Borza won first place in the competition, receiving the Martin Epstein Award at AMIA 2024.
“I’m honored to win the Martin Epstein Award this year, especially among such strong competition. I owe immense gratitude to my advisor, Brad Malin, and to my other co-authors for their guidance and support throughout the research process,” Borza said. “Also, a huge thank you goes to Jessica Ancker for giving me feedback on the final manuscript.”
“This award is very prestigious. It’s considered to be an indicator of who the up and comers in the field are,” said Bradley Malin, PhD, Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, vice chair for Research Affairs in DBMI, and co-director of the AI Discovery and Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation and Clinical Excellence Center.
The AMIA student paper competition honors research conducted by students in informatics programs nationwide. This year, the competition included eight judges and more than 60 papers that were accepted from various academic institutions. After deliberation, eight finalists were selected and asked to present their work in a session during the conference. After the presentations, the top three winners were selected.
Borza is the fourth DBMI winner of the AMIA student paper competition since 1983, following Sharon Davis, PhD, MS, in 2019, Elizabeth Ashley Durham, PhD, in 2010, and Yin Aphinyanaphongs, MD, PhD, in 2003. This is Suresh’s second year in a row being named a finalist.
Finally, Marco Barbero Mota, PhD student, received second place at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Working Group Innovation Competition for his paper titled “A data-driven approach to discover and quantify systemic lupus erythematosus etiological heterogeneity from electronic health records.”
DBMI offers predoctoral research training for students interested in pursuing a master’s degree and doctorate in biomedical informatics.
