Q: What’s your background?
A: My undergraduate degree was in a somewhat obscure engineering branch called Theoretical & Applied Mechanics – but during university, I had the chance to study abroad, in of all places, UC Swansea – ostensibly to take some biology pre-med requirements that were not available to me at the University of Illinois as an Engineering major, but also because I thought I might have the chance to learn to surf. Who knew the water would be so cold?
Q: How did you get into the linkage space?
A: After medical school and medical residency in Wisconsin, I was encouraged to pursue further training in informatics by a mentor (who also taught me how to fly-fish).
During my NIH Informatics Fellowship in Indianapolis (Regenstrief Institute), one of my first projects was linking data between multiple sources within a hospital (infections, patient bed locations in the hospital and audit log data), and I was able to use that data to recreate the movement of nursing staff throughout the hospital and identify possible risk factors for infection transmission. Read the paper here.
It was my first foray into the power of data linkage to generate novel insights, and it also raised my interest in the power of linking by place using GIS (Geographic Information Systems), in addition to linkage by person.
Q: What was some of your early linkage work? What are you working on now?
A: After moving back to Chicago, where at that time there was no data linkage going on between competing healthcare institutions in the city, I tried to extend my prior linkage work to help create more accurate disease estimates in Chicago by weaving together data from multiple health systems. In order to work through regulatory challenges (e.g. HIPAA), we developed a novel Privacy Preserving Record Linkage tool.
As more and more groups kept asking to use the tool, we spun out a small startup to provide support to other groups interested in data linkage, and we were later acquired by Datavant.
Today in Chicago, we continue with data linkage work through our citywide CAPriCORN network and I’m particularly excited about our use of data linkage for public and population health, and to better understand issues like homelessness and climate change.
Q: How did you get involved with IPDLN?
A: I had heard about IPDLN through computer science colleagues and had published in The International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), but I was never able to attend in-person until Edinburgh in 2022. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m super excited to be able to host it in my hometown of Chicago this September. I hope we can keep up to the high bar that has been set.
Q: How do you see the future population data linkage?
A: What I love about linkage is the novelty and opportunity for new discoveries. Every time we can bring in new data types or communities or scientific domains, there’s geometric combinatorial possibilities, as long as you can responsibly navigate through all the challenges along the way. I particularly see opportunities with the linkage of people and place data to bring in the social and environmental context to health research – and also with linking in detailed “omics” data, like genomic, metabolomics, proteomic data, in order to better understand what drives disease and encourages wellness.