Jette Henderson and Ryan Bridges have been awarded the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Distinguished Clinical Research Informatics Award for their work “PheKnow-Cloud: A Tool for Evaluating High-Throughput Phenotype Candidates using Online Medical Literature.” AMIA is an organization committed to the vision that informatics is the key to accelerating the current goals of healthcare reform. AMIA “supports the current and next generation of informatics professionals by providing members opportunities to grow professionally, fostering collaboration and networking to support members’ work to improve people’s lives and expanding members’ leadership opportunities within the association and in the field.” The AMIA Awards Committee recognizes up to five notable and distinguished papers from the Annual Symposium.

Jette Henderson is a doctoral student in Texas ECE and mathematics departments where she works under Joydeep Ghosh at the Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Lab. Henderson is currently developing machine learning techniques to tackle healthcare challenges. Her research focuses on nonnegative tensor factorization to extract phenotypes from EHR data in a high-throughput manner. She is also developing tools to explore the validity of these phenotypes.

Ryan Bridges is a Texas ECE alumnus who currently works as a software development intern at Epic Systems. He previously served as a research assistant at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (2015) and was an embedded designs engineer at Nexersys (2014).