Student, Professor Receive Medical Informatics Association's Best Paper Award
Dr. Sanda Harabagiu and Travis Goodwin BS'11, MS'13
Travis Goodwin BS'11, MS'13, a computer science PhD student at UT Dallas, and Dr. Sanda Harabagiu, professor of computer science and Research Initiation Chair in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, received the Homer R. Warner Award at the 2017 American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Annual Symposium.
The award recognizes a symposium paper that best describes approaches to improving computerized information acquisition, knowledge data acquisition and management, and experimental results documenting the value of these approaches.
Goodwin was lead author of “Inferring Clinical Correlations from EEG Reports with Deep Neural Learning.” The paper presents a novel method for automatically extracting and analyzing the clinical correlations between findings documented in a neurological report and the overall clinical picture of the patient, which helps to mitigate misdiagnoses and improve patient care. The research was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, part of its Big Data to Knowledge program.
“Travis is an exceptionally creative student who shows incredible promise. I think he will be an excellent academic because of his creativity, his hard work and his effectiveness in being able to see what other people have not yet seen,” Harabagiu said.
This is the second year in a row that Goodwin received a prestigious award at a conference. In 2016, the paper “Medical Question Answering for Clinical Decision Support,” co-authored with Harabagiu, received the Best Student Paper Award from the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.
Goodwin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from UT Dallas.
Doctoral Student Selected for Health Policy Research Scholars Program
Marcela Gutierrez
Marcela Gutierrez, a PhD student in public policy and political economy in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, has been selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar.
Gutierrez, who is also assistant professor in practice in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Arlington, studies how health policy and the social determinants of health are shaped by their broader socioeconomic and political framework. She said she hopes her research can help communities leverage their political and economic power, and promote institutional changes that contribute to health equity.
“I am fascinated by the process of unraveling how our historical legacies shape our understanding of the world and our place within it,” Gutierrez said. “I believe that understanding how our political and socioeconomic system came to be can allow communities to better leverage their own power to take action for their health and well-being.”
The Health Policy Research Scholars is a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, led by George Washington University. Scholars receive coaching, mentoring, networking opportunities and an advanced leadership curriculum. Gutierrez was one of 40 scholars selected for the program this year and the only one in Texas.